Yet another PIX 7.0 question - hw upgrades?

[tbissett]

Can anyone shed some light as to whether or not hardware upgrades, such as additional RAM, will be needed to handle the new OS version 7?

[e.delcourt]

I search the new version 7.0, and i don't where i get it, have you a link where i can get it.

Best regards

[mostiguy]

Its not out.

Well, it appears cisco is doing some tweakage for 7.1, which is the first 7.x available for the 501s and 506's.

I tend to think some of what they will do is for product positioning, as opposed to hardware limitations:

eg:

a 501 pix, with a 5x86 133mhz cpu, can probably only handle 10 concurrent ipsec tunnels, which is its limit in software

a 506e pix, with the same cpu as a 515e, is arbitrarily limited to 25 conc. ipsec tunnels, while the 515e is not - this is a product positioning limitation.

Historically, cisco has been very proficient in doing firewalling efficiently on the pixen - a classic 515 has a 200mhz pentium cpu, but can still firewall a good amount of traffic. That said, I bet there will be features that the 501 pixen will not support due to hardware limitations, and thus the software will inhibit you from doing so. The 506s will probably have limits vis a vis the 515s, even though their cpu is the same.

Matt

[scoclayton]

No plans at this time to require hardware upgrades to support the 7.0 code when it becomes available. As has been mentioned before, the PIX 520 will not be supported by 7.0 and the 501/506/506E will also not be supported (initially, anyway). However, we are getting ready to start the beta testing of 7.0 so the statement above could change.

Scott