Cisco Catalyst Center Administrator Guide, Release 3.2.x

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Overview of a Multiple Catalyst Center deployment

Updated: May 4, 2026

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Overview

This is an overview of a Multiple Catalyst Center deployment.

When you integrate more than one Catalyst Center cluster with a single Cisco ISE system, each Catalyst Center cluster is independent. No information is shared among the clusters. In this scenario, when you deploy Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) on Catalyst Center, the set of virtual networks (VNs) and all other SD-Access is local to each cluster.

Catalyst Center provides a mechanism to coordinate SD-Access and Group-Based Policy (GBP) elements across multiple Catalyst Center clusters integrated with a single Cisco ISE system. To enable global administration of SD-Access across multiple Catalyst Center clusters with a consistent set of VNs, the Multiple Catalyst Center feature leverages the existing secure connection with Cisco ISE to propagate VNs, security group tags (SGTs), Access Contracts, and Group-Based Access Control (GBAC) Policy from one cluster to another cluster. Cisco ISE takes the information learned from one cluster (known as the Author Node) and propagates it to the other clusters (known as the Reader Nodes).

The Multiple Catalyst Center feature is available when you integrate it with Cisco ISE Release 3.2 or later.

Cisco Multiple DNA Center Deployment Overview
Note

  • The Multiple Catalyst Center operation is disabled by default. To use this feature, select the Enable Multiple Catalyst Center operation (under Advanced Settings) when integrating Catalyst Center with Cisco ISE. You can enable this feature during the initial configuration or at a later time (after Cisco ISE is already integrated). After this functionality is enabled, only deleting the Cisco ISE integration can disable the functionality.

  • If you are using earlier releases of Cisco ISE, contact your account team to submit a request to the Cisco SDA Design Council for inclusion in the Limited Availability program. A Multiple Catalyst Center Limited Availability package is provided to allow access to the limited availability (LA) version of this functionality. For more information, see the Multiple Cisco DNA Center to Single Cisco ISE Prescriptive Deployment Guide.

The Multiple Catalyst Center feature has specific role designations for the clusters:

  • Author Node cluster

  • Reader Node cluster