ASA anyconnect licenses

[khaled alodat]

Hello ,

I have two ASA 5540 acting as active/standby , at the moment the sec/act and the pri/standby , the ios is 8.4(4).

on the active one which is the  Secondary i have the following licenses :

AnyConnect Premium Peers          : 2              perpetual

and on the primary which is standby 

AnyConnect Premium Peers          : 102            perpetual

is it normal not to have the licenses number  on both of them ? if no , why they are on the standby not the primary ?

another question:

 we have purchased a new two 5545 ASA and have been configured as active/standby , can I move the license from the old two (mentioned up) to the new ones, 

what i need to move are :

anyconnect premium peers

anycpnnect for mobile

anyconnect essential .

The ios for the new ASA is 9.1

Thanks,

[Richard Burts · Accepted solution]

What you are seeing on your 5540 is normal. By default each ASA ships with a license for 2 Premium peers. If you are using the AnyConnect client you can purchase licenses for more premium peers and it is obvious that a license for 100 peers was purchased and installed on one of the ASA so that it now has 102 peer license. The other ASA has the default of 2 Premium peers. In ASA code since 8.3 the ASAs in an active/standby failover pair will share licenses so you do not need to purchase licenses for both of them. And whichever ASA is the active one will be able to support 104 users.

In general you can not transfer licenses between ASAs. (If there is a problem and one ASA must be replaced using the RMA process there is provision for transferring those licenses.) 

You mention that you want to move both AnyConnect Premium and AnyConnect Essentials. You really do not want to move both of them (or you do not want to purchase both licenses for your new ASA5545s). On the ASA you can run one or the other of these licenses but you can not run both at the same time. I have worked with customers who have both licenses on their ASA (as apparently you do) and it was either because they originally purchased a small number of Premium licenses and then purchased Essentials because they wanted a larger number and the Essentials are more cost effective for a large number of users, or it was because they started with Essentials and then purchased Premium because there was some feature they wanted that is available in Premium but not in Essentials. But as they purchase replacement ASAs they would certainly purchase only one type of license and not both Essentials and Premium.

HTH

Rick

[Richard Burts]

I am glad that my response was helpful. Thank you for using the rating system to mark this question as answered. This will help other readers in the forum to identify discussions which have helpful information. I hope to see you continue to be active in the forum.

HTH

Rick