CBS 250 EoL

[train00wreck]

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/business-250-series-smart-switches/business-cbs250-series-switch-mod-eol.html

Well, I thought I was getting a super good deal buying a "Cisco Refresh" CBS250-24P-4X switch from Amazon for $299 on April 22 of last year 2024. Literally 1 week later they announced Eol....... of course. My concern is that the EoL page has a "End of SW Maintenance Releases Date: HW" of October of this year 2025. Does that mean that there will absolutely be no more security updates to the firmware after that date? Or would they still release for example a security update to address a vulnerability. Thanks in advance for responses.

[marce1000 · Accepted solution]

              - You won't have security updates neither ,

 M.

[train00wreck]

Well that's just great... at least I can disable access to the management interfaces from certain VLANs.

[M02@rt37 · Accepted solution]

Hello @train00wreck 

Once end of software maintenance release Date (October 2025) passes, Cisco will no longer provide security updates for the CBS250 series. While Cisco might release a critical patch in exceptional cases, it's not guaranteed...

So, if security is a concern, limiting access to the management interface as you mentioned helps reduce risk, but the safest long-term approach is planning for a replacement before the official support ends...

[train00wreck]

Understood, thanks for the responses everyone here. The switch in question is just used personally at my home. I will take my chances. Thanks again.

I will say that I wish there would be some sort of longer term options for using switches like this. I am using it specifically for the 4 10Gb SFP+ interfaces, and have transferred many terabytes of data through those ports. I know Cisco would never do it, but open-sourcing as much as possible would be a fantastic way to end-of-life the very capable hardware here. Anyways, just my opinion.

[shikakabat]

I am personally fuming over the short lifecycle of the CBS line.

The Cisco CBS350 became generally available in 04/2020. We did an entire switch refresh in 2022 and like to get 5-7 years out of our switches. EOL for the series was announced in 04/2024 with an EOS of 05/2025, with no exception for security updates. That's a 5-year total life cycle. This is in contrast with other EOL's like the C1000, where Cisco is giving an extra year of security updates. 

I expect this from consumer switch vendors who don't like to manage several code bases, but Cisco is supposed to be enterprise, even with their small business lines. I suppose full Catalyst switches is the only way to guarantee long-term support now, and for that reason I am shopping out other vendors. After the CBS rug-pull, I wouldn't touch their replacement C1300 line with a ten foot pole.

[train00wreck]

Yeah I feel you 100%, I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with previous versions of the "Small Business" lines of Cisco hardware, going back to the LInksys acquisition. I've personally never trusted them enough to use them in production, though I have encountered them in client situations many times (frequently in some sort of failure mode). The hardware in the CBS lines are consumer-level Marvell/Arm SoCs, in the case of my 250 it is the 88E1680 switching chip. That part has firmware/drivers going back to 2016. I would not be surprised if the true "EoL" comes from them. Not that it makes much of a difference for the end user.....

I wish you luck, friend!