Smart licensing problems

[Jesper Sorensen]

Firesight Management Center (VMware) 6.0.1 which was upgraded from 5.4 with classic licenses and worked without issues.

Now the licenses shows up as "Failed [ node  ]" :

Went through the process of converting them to smart entitlements and assigned them to a virtual account:

Assigned that smart license to the management center but the licenses does not show up:

The Firesight Management Center is running version 6.0.0.1, also tried creating a new, seperate, FMC with version 6.1.0 but with the same results.

Any ideas on how to get the subscription licenses to show up as smart licenses in FMC?

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

Note in your smart license screenshot, it indicates "Threat Defense" licenses. If your ASA is running ASA code (not FirePOWER Threat Defense (FTD) image), you should continue to use classic licenses.

Smart licenses are only used for the new FTD image type. That applies to both 6.0 and 6.1 FirePOWER Management Center when managing/licensing ASA FirePOWER services modules.

You may need to open a TAC case and request the licensing team to convert your licenses back. You will need classic Protect+Control, URL Filtering and Malware licenses.

[Jesper Sorensen]

That makes alot of sense, so would this issue be resolved by updating the ASA code to the FTD image? 

What puzzles me is that I would assume the licenses would show up in the FMC regardless of what image the ASA is running.

[Marvin Rhoads]

FTD is an entirely different image. It does not have complete feature parity with the ASA image and migration from one to the other is a mostly manual process that's not recommended unless your Cisco or partner SE has looked at the setup and recommended it.

Since you had registered your FMC to Cisco Smart licensing it picked up the licenses assigned there. Those licenses are simply not relevant to the ASA FirePOWER Services module. They cannot be used with anything other than an ASA running FTD image.