Security

I am wondering what others are using for their Clearpass implementation.  I have head you want two partitions for upgrade purposes.  The documentation recommends 250GB.  That means I need to ask the SAN team for 500GB wich is a tall and expensive request.  All we are uing it for at the moment is sponsored guest access and TACACSauth for Network devices.  What are the thoughts on a realistic disk configuration?  Is 500Gb absolutely necessary?

 

Thanks

I have recently attempted to upgrade a device which failed as it needed three disks.

There have been a few other posts on this topic. The main thing is that these are the recommended min amount of disk space. Most people to recognize the fact that you are not only authenticating the users but we are collecting accounting information, historical records, backups, and the list goes on...:) So over a short period of time that can add up quickly. I understand that you are just going to use TACACS and guest but when you fire up the server it has a

 

1-default of 15 gig drive where the image is stored

1-running HD of either 250 gig or 512 Depending on the VM size

1-Upgrade drive with a matching size of the running HD. (they must be the same size)

 

(This screen shot is an EVAL VM with 2-80 gig HD which you are asked to have a min of 40 gig for testing)

 

 

Yes, that can add up on HD cost but it’s a minimum size for a reason. Some people do ask about removing the second running dive after the upgrade, but I personally do NOT recommend that. You never know if you have some kind of drive corruption or mistake where you need to roll back to the old drive. We upgrade the CPPM server just like our controllers where you have one running drive and one upgrade partition. Once you size the HD for the VM there is no way to add additional space so that is way we are asking for the full amount up front. 

 

One other thing to look at is that the appliances have 1 TB for the 5k and 3.6 TB for the 25 k.... You do have the option if the HD costs are too high for your VM environment to buy either a VM or Appliance.

 

 

 

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The following are recommended requirements for the ClearPass Policy Manager 6.0 Virtual Appliance to properly operate in 64-bit VMware ESX or ESXi Server installations. These recommendations supersede earlier requirements that were published for ClearPass Policy Manager 5.x installations.

Supported ESX/ESXi

• 4.0 (Note: recommended minimum version of software for the CP-VA-500 and CP-VA-5K as it does not support greater than 8 virtual CPUs required for the CP-VA-25K)
• 5.0
• 5.1

Note: VMware Player is not supported.

Sizing of VMware for Evaluation Appliance

• 2 Virtual CPUs
• 40 GB disk space
• 4 GB RAM
• 2 Gigabit virtual switched ports (only 1 needed if not using separate ports for data and management)

 

Sizing of VMware Production Appliances

CP-VA-500:

• 2 Virtual CPUs
• 250 GB disk space (a second drive of 250 GB will be needed at the time of upgrades)
• 4 GB RAM
• 2 Gigabit virtual switched ports (only 1 needed if not using separate ports for data and management)

Here are the required specs of the drive in the hardware appliance:

  Number of disks : 1
  Capacity : 500GB (7.2K rpm)
  RAID : No RAID
  Functional IOP rating for a 40-60 read/write profile for 4K random read/write = 75

CP-VA-5K: Updated July, 2013

• 8 Virtual CPUs
• 250 GB disk space (a second drive of 250 GB will be needed at the time of upgrades)
• 8 GB RAM
• 2 Gigabit virtual switched ports (only 1 needed if not using separate ports for data and management)

Here are the required specs of the drives in the hardware appliance:

  Number of disks : 2 (500GB ea)
  Total Capacity for 2 disks: 1TB (7.2K rpm)
  RAID : RAID 1
  Functional IOP rating for a 40-60 read/write profile for 4K random read/write = 105  

CP-VA-25K: Updated July 2013

• At least 12 Virtual CPUs (Aruba hardware appliances ship with 24 cores)
• 512 GB disk space (a second drive of 512 GB will be needed at the time of upgrades)
• At least 24 GB RAM (Aruba hardware appliances ship with 48GB RAM)
• 2 Gigabit virtual switched ports (only 1 needed if not using separate ports for data and management)

Here are the required specs of the drives in the hardware appliance:

   Number of disks : 6 (600GB ea)  
   Capacity : 3.6TB (10K rpm)
   RAID : RAID 10
   Functional IOP rating for a 40-60 read/write profile for 4K random read/write = 350

Note: In order for a CP-VA-25K virtual appliance to properly support up 25,000 unique authentications with full logging capability, customers should match the number of CPUs and RAM that ship in our hardware appliances. If your customers do not have the VA resources to support a full workload, have them consider ordering the Policy Manager hardware appliance

 

Does anyone know what the procedure is to upgrade a "physical" machine ?

We have two of them that need to be upgrade from 6.1.4 -> 6.4.3

 

Is there any prep work that needs to be done under this scenario ?

No the hardware will take care of all the drive settings on its own. Just like the VM you should always make sure you take a backup and download it to a separate resource incase of any failures.