ASA Active/Active Failover Licencing requirements 8.3 ->

[Jouni Forss]

Hi,

I've read through the documents on Cisco.com about this matter but still felt I need to confirm that I understood the thing correctly.

So basicly the situation is the following.

I'm using a lab ASA 5510 Failover pair in Active/Active mode running 8.2 software. The owner of the lab had previously ordered only one 5 security context licence.

To my understanding to be able to use licence sharing between the ASA firewalls you'll have to be running 8.3 software at minimum.

But now that I've read through some material regarding licencing about Failover pairs I came to the understanding that licence sharing in Failover pair will only work if the pair is Single mode? Is this correct?

So is the situation basicly the following for licence sharing:

- Single mode Active/Standby: Need 1 licence that can be shared by the pair

- Multiple mode Active/Standby: Need licences for both units

- Multiple mode Active/Active: Need licences for both units

- Jouni

[Marvin Rhoads]

I believe your understanding is correct. Per this link, "Shared licenses are supported only in single context mode, so Active/Active failover is not supported."

[Jouni Forss]

To my understandng that document only mentions about the VPN licence sharing between ASA and not the whole licence.

And software 8.2 didn't have the option of sharing 1 licence between the failover pair to my understanding

Were planning on upgrading the lab ASA 5510s with more memory (required by 8.3 as their older manufactured ASA models with not enough memory) and then upgrading to 8.3

What I'm really asking for is the confirmation that when we do get the ASAs running on 8.3 software, will I be able to get the failover running in multiple mode either in active/active (prefered) or active/standby with just single licence.

I know that running a single mode failover pair in active/standby (active/active would ofcourse mean it would be in multiple mode already)  with software 8.3 manages with 1 shared licence as I have done that before but I have no previous expirience regards to licence sharing on ASAs running in multiple mode + failover

- Jouni