ASA 5510 more Memory for 8.3

[itomercateo]

We have some ASA 5510. Because of the update to version 8.2 we upgraded our memory from 256 MB (original) to 512 with the memory upgrade kit from Cisco. Now the new version 8.3 requires again a memory upgrade of 1 GB.

So the question is, what is the maximum possible memory size on the ASA 5510?

There is only one Slot for one memory module. I guess there is a limitation of memory module size.

Because buying 1 GB now, but need more later is not my imagination of cheap total coast of ownership.

[Jennifer Halim]

The requirement for 1GB memory on ASA 5510 was just being released a couple of weeks ago for the new version of ASA 8.3 (as

this version has a complete transformation of NAT as well as global ACL). I don't believe there will be a requirement for further memory upgrade anytime soon.

[Panos Kampanakis]

Only one slot of memory will be used on the ASA, so you can have only one RAM dim in it.

As haligenn suggested, there won't be a memory upgrade need any time soon.

I hope it helps.

PK

[snowmizer]

But what is the maximum amount of memory that you can put in an ASA 5510? Even though there may not be a need to upgrade to more than 1GB of RAM anytime soon I would still like to know the maximum amount of memory that can be put in the 5510. I'd like to be proactive instead of going to my boss every 2-6 months and telling him that we need to upgrade memory before we can upgrade the system software on our ASA.

Thanks.

[edadios]

You can only order the following parts for the 5510

ASA5510-MEM-1GB=    1 GB Memory Upgrade for Cisco ASA 5510      
ASA5510-MEM-512=     512 MB Memory for Cisco ASA 5510

The maximum you can have is 1gb, as you can only use one slot.

See the note per this document.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/asa/hw/maintenance/guide/procs.html#wp1075778

Regards,

[it]

I've wondered the same thing about the ASA. The heart of the ASA is a standard Pentium 4 CPU (Celeron I think) which means it's PC-based architecture and the memory modules are nothing more than DDR SDRAM.  I think Cisco modifies the ROM on the memory modules to vendor-lock them so that you can't just install any old memory modules in the device.  This also means that Cisco can charge insane prices for what would normally be inexpensive hardware.  But I digress.  Additionally the Cisco ASA firmware is just a custom made linux distribution with the Cisco IOS running as a shell on top.

So I think the maximum amount of memory the ASA could support is 4GB since there's only one memory slot.  Maybe 8GB but I've never seen a 8GB DDR memory module.

As edadios points out the largest memory module that Cisco provides is 1GB but it wouldn't exactly be hard for Cisco to sell 2 and 4GB modules.