PIX Licensing Help!

[julihato]

Dear Ciscoer,

Just wanna know why Cisco PIX also has a user Licensing methode?

AFAIK Cisco only sell the Restricted and Unrestricted License. Can anyone here explains for me? What's the purpose of this? For VPN tunnel?

10-User License

The Cisco PIX 501 Firewall 10-user license supports up to 10 concurrent source IP addresses from your internal network to traverse through the PIX 501. The integrated DHCP server supports up to 32 DHCP leases.

50-User License

The Cisco PIX 501 Firewall 50-user license supports up to 50 concurrent source IP addresses from your internal network to traverse through the PIX 501. The integrated DHCP server supports up to 128 DHCP leases. As your needs grow, a 10-to-50 user upgrade license is also available, which allows you to extend your investment in PIX 501 equipment.

Best Regards,

HATO

[gfullage]

I believe the theory behind it was so people don't buy a 501 for their large corporate network and try and push 300 users through it. The 501 and 506 have been designed and spec'd for small office - home office environments with small amounts of users. If we didn't put user restrictions on it then people would buy these for large deployments and then feel the product was no good when it didn't meet their throughput requirements.

This way there's a limited amount of traffic that people can push through these simply because there's a limited amount of users that can be connected at any one time.

[gordon.hawkins]

Sorry to resurrect this old thread... but I am considering a 501 for one of my clients. It's a great firewall for SOHO but they have at least 15 users. It seems really silly for me to sell them a 50-user license when they will never use anywhere close to 50 concurrent connections.

Is there any plans or current methods for them to be licensed for 15-20-25 users on the PIX 501?

It seems pretty silly to me that Cisco has 10 or 50 users, and nothing inbetween.

Thanks for your help!

[ROBERT CROOKS]

I had purchased a 501 for one of my sites a few months ago, a 3DES 50-user model for about $1,900 CDN. I've seen them on ebay for $600 CDN and less though. Yesterday I priced out a 10 user model and 3DES for $1,095 new. So it is really double the price for 40 more users. Cisco sells packs of 10 user license as product # PIX-501-SW-10, so you should be able to increment to 20-30-40-50. They even sell a license, PIX-501-SW-50, which is 50-user, so logic would tell me that you can get a 501 to support over 50 users. I mean the DHCP server does do 253 addresses after all. Its hard to find anyone, even at Cisco, who knows exactly the answer to these sort of questions some time.

If I get the chance, I will try to order a 10 user license and add it to my 501.

Robert Crooks c.Tech

Ivaco Rolling Mills

L'Orignal, Ontario

[marcusl]

Hi,

Unfortunally, the 501 is only licensed in either 10 or 50 user license. The 50 user license is just an upgrade from the 10 user license and the 10 user license is not additive.

/M