Some time ago I published a post about installing Cisco ACS v.5.x Appliances on VMware. Now it’s turn for Cisco ISE (Indentity ServicesEngine). This appliance also has full VMware support, so we don’t need to buy a dedicated server hardware to test it.

We need the to have a properly configured Virtual Machine on our system in order to boot and install this appliance. Minimum requirements and installation procedure can be found here.

Let’s see how I did this.

  • Create a new Virtual Machine. I’m using ESXi so following screenshots will be based on it. Select Custom.

Picture1

  • Name the Virtual Machine as you want to see it on the inventory.

Picture2

  • Select the Storage location where you want to have the machine. Take care about recommendations on the previous link.

Picture3

  • Select the VM Hardware version. I’ve tried this appliance on ESX 4 and it worked fine, so we can choose whatever we want.

Picture4

  • On this page we have to choose OS as Linux and CentOS x86 as this appliance is based on it.

Picture5

  • We will set the number of processor and cores. This selection depends on the performance we will need late. For testing purposes I choose 1 and 1.

Picture6

  • Set the amount of RAM. Caution here. Minimum will be 4 GB. With less memory, installation will abort and shutdown the appliance. Once installed we can set it lower but for now we have to use 4 GB.

Picture7

  • Select the vSwitch to which connect the machine. Obviously that vSwitch should have connectivity to the devices.

Picture8

  • In the next page we choose the kind of controller for the hard disk. I’ve set the default choice without problems.

Picture9

  • Choose New if we are not going to use a previously configured virtual hard disk.

Picture10

  • Now I’m going to set the capacity to 80 GB. Following instructions provided by Cisco. The minimum amount for this to work is 60 GB that will activate the “evaluation version” of the appliance. Enough for me. In production environments this should be “a little bit bigger”. Provisioning type doesn’t matter at all in evaluation so choose the one that best fit your needs.

Picture11

  • Let the virtual device node unchanged.

Picture12

  • Review all the configuration. If you did a mistake we can go back.

Picture13

  • Finally we have to insert the install media on the CD drive, so let’s do that.

Picture14

Now we have our appliance ready to boot and install. Open Console and push Play button. Install is pretty straightforward. At the end we have to make initial network and database configuration. Choose the addressing you need and remember password policy settings when configuring ISE database password. Wait for initial ISE software install and configuration. Enjoy!!

Here we have a very short video of the whole process. I’ve made it a little bit shorter by cutting innecesary " iced " screens. Whole installation took about 45 minutes in my system.

09/2019 - Video was uploaded to Youtube