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User Guide for Cisco Secure Access Control System 5.3
OL-24201-01
Chapter 1 Introducing ACS 5.3
ACS Distributed Deployment
ACS provides advanced monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting tools that help you administer and
manage your ACS deployments. For more information on the monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting
capabilities of ACS, see Chapter 11, “Monitoring and Reporting in ACS.”.
For more information about using ACS for device administration and network access scenarios, see
Chapter 4, “Common Scenarios Using ACS.”
Cisco Secure ACS:
• Enforces access policies for VPN and wireless users.
• Provides simplified device administration.
• Provides advanced monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting tools.
There are several changes and enhancements in ACS 5.3 compared to ACS 5.2. For a complete list of
new and changed features, see
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/cisco_secure_access_control_system/5.3/release/notes/
acs_53_rn.html.
Related Topics
• ACS Distributed Deployment, page 1-2
• ACS Management Interfaces, page 1-3
ACS Distributed Deployment
ACS 5.3 is delivered preinstalled on a standard Cisco Linux-based appliance, and supports a fully
distributed deployment.
An ACS deployment can consist of a single instance, or multiple instances deployed in a distributed
manner, where all instances in a system are managed centrally. One ACS instance becomes the primary
instance and you can register additional ACS instances to the primary instance as secondary instances.
All instances have the configuration for the entire deployment, which provides redundancy for
configuration data.
The primary instance centralizes the configuration of the instances in the deployment. Configuration
changes made in the primary instance are automatically replicated to the secondary instance.
You can force a full replication to the secondary instance. Full replication is used when a new secondary
instance is registered and in other cases when the replication gap between the secondary instance and
the primary instance is significant.
Related Topic
• ACS 4.x and 5.3 Replication, page 1-2
ACS 4.x and 5.3 Replication
In ACS 4.x, you must select the database object types (or classes) you wish to replicate from primary
instance to the secondary instance. When you replicate an object, a complete configuration copy is made
on the secondary instance.
In ACS 5.3, any configuration changes made in the primary instance are immediately replicated to the
secondary instance. Only the configuration changes made since the last replication are propagated to the
secondary instance.