Solved: ASA 5525-x smartnet contract & licensing

Janco · ‎09-13-2023

Hi all,

Let's begin with the elephant in the room... YES, I know the ASA 5525-x is eol but i have a few of them laying around and i wanted to place them in a homelab to play around with. I would like to download the latest firmware for the device but when i go to the official support site of the cisco 5525-x i won't be able to download anything without a service contract (down the rabbit hole we go).

So i started looking into the options, which service contract would i need, what would the price be, does that still give me the option to download firmware in case i screw up my os and need to reimage.

I have never had a licensing model cause me such a bad headache. Every forum i land on there are more complaints about the cisco licensing model then actual information. Nine out of ten times the advice is to just switch to some other vendor such as Sophos, Fortinet, watchguard, or palo alto.

However i am a stubborn fool and eager to get more familiar with cisco so we press on.

I already found out that a smartnet contract would suffice but there are a lot of flavours of smartnet support contracts and the price range varies from €100,- to around €3000,-. My question is what SMARTNET service contract would i require to download the latest software and image of the cisco asa 5525-x. Also would the service contract alone be enough or do i also need to buy a license seeing smartnet is a contract not a license.

I just want to determine if the cost of running this to play around with is worth it. A few hundred and we are fine if it costs over a 1000 then i rather spend that on a more community open firewall.

Milos_Jovanovic · ‎09-18-2023

Hi @Janco,

As someone who works with multiple vendors, I can just say that each vendor has its own caveats. With one, licensing is simpler, but more expensive, with other licensing is simle but support is awful. So there really isn't a golden bullet here, and that is where communities and partners come in picture, as they are here to make things easier. If you want to do things on your own, I would still dare to say that Cisco's community and documentation is quite extensive, and you have tons of examples on how to configure something, so learning should be quite possible.

Now, when you say ASA5525, I assume you have ASA SW on top, so it really depends on what you want to do. If this is purely for lab and playing around, I would invest minimum in this, by buying support for single device, which would allow me to download SW. License-wise, few features require additional license, so again, it depends on what you want to do with them. For most features, license that is already attached should be just fine. If you have Firepower on top, that can be different story, but you need to share more details about what you want to lab.

In general, partner support should be cheaper than Cisco's direct support, but it is best to check this with your local Cisco partner (ask them for a quote and explain what you are expecting). Now, about SmartNet, and again, if this is for lab, then you want lowest level of support which would be "Support Essentials 8x5xNext Business Day", which should also be the cheapest one for you.

Kind regards,

Milos

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Milos_Jovanovic · ‎09-18-2023

Hi @Janco,

As someone who works with multiple vendors, I can just say that each vendor has its own caveats. With one, licensing is simpler, but more expensive, with other licensing is simle but support is awful. So there really isn't a golden bullet here, and that is where communities and partners come in picture, as they are here to make things easier. If you want to do things on your own, I would still dare to say that Cisco's community and documentation is quite extensive, and you have tons of examples on how to configure something, so learning should be quite possible.

Now, when you say ASA5525, I assume you have ASA SW on top, so it really depends on what you want to do. If this is purely for lab and playing around, I would invest minimum in this, by buying support for single device, which would allow me to download SW. License-wise, few features require additional license, so again, it depends on what you want to do with them. For most features, license that is already attached should be just fine. If you have Firepower on top, that can be different story, but you need to share more details about what you want to lab.

In general, partner support should be cheaper than Cisco's direct support, but it is best to check this with your local Cisco partner (ask them for a quote and explain what you are expecting). Now, about SmartNet, and again, if this is for lab, then you want lowest level of support which would be "Support Essentials 8x5xNext Business Day", which should also be the cheapest one for you.

Kind regards,

Milos

Janco · ‎10-02-2023

Thank you for your reply and my apologies for my late response.

I think i went about it the wrong way. I wanted to increase my experience with cisco products by using it in my own lab as well so i am forced to use it more often as well and can test a bit more extensive. Because the software updates/downloads are behind the cisco paywall i will just use an opensource appliance for my lab and i will keep using cisco labs (learning and modeling) to increase my experience with cisco that way.

ilay · ‎09-19-2023

If it is only used as a personal experiment, I prefer to find some image files shared by others on the Internet（such as Google/Bing or Telegram）. Just check the file hash after download.
Any other service is not cost-effective for personal use

Marvin Rhoads · ‎09-19-2023

++ what Milos said.

FYI, downloading images from unauthorized third parties is a violation of the software terms and conditions. I'm not a lawyer nor do I work for Cisco, but it is wrong. If you want a firewall that costs nothing to acquire then check open source options.