PIx OS 7.2.4 vs 8.0.3

[osiristrading123]

Hi all

We are finally getting round to upgrading our Pixes (ver 6.3) to a newer version. We have been happy with ver 6.3, but are after new features, especially QoS.

Is 8.0.3 stable enough for production? What are the major differences between 7.2 and 8 versions?

As mentioned before, we are after QoS - specifically traffic-shaping based on DCSP, and also the better monitoring features on the newer versions.

Thanks

[osiristrading123]

Further to the above, I see we need to upgrade to 7.x first.

A couple of questions:

1) Can we go directly to 7.2.4 from 6.3.4?

2) The upgrade documentation mentions 515 and 535 requiring monitor mode upgrade - we are running 515E's - does this apply?

3) How can we minimise the risk of being disconnected from a remote site, since the firewalls are at a data centre far away from the office. We are running non stateful failover.

Thanks

[Gian Paolo]

Hello,

I'm going to upgrade a 6.3(5) PIX515 to 8.0(3). I've tried this software version in lab and it seems stable.

For the upgrade I'll try from remote, but with a person in the remote site for assistace.

To minimise the risk I've tried the same operation in lab a couple of times, I hope Murphy's Law will not interfere! It think write a checklist before doing the upgrade can help.

Good luck!

[osiristrading123]

We've done 4 out of our 8 firewalls. The conversion of the config works very well, but our concern now is the high CPU usage. We're seeing about 3 times the CPU usage compared to 6.3 - anyone else experience this?