Licensing Headache

[Steven Williams]

My current ASA 5525-X is licensed with Anyconnect premium = 2 and 750 "Other VPN"

What does other mean? Also does this mean that only two clients with Anyconnect can use the ASA for VPN? Or is Premium different than Anyconnect alone?          

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

AnyConnect licenses on the ASA have two basic type - Essentials and Premium. You have to run one or the other - they are mutually exclusive.

Newer models come with Premium active but only for two clients as you noted. That's sort of a teaser hoping you'll try some of the features of Premium and spring for the upgrade to one of the higher licensing tiers. An alternative you can opt for is to buy a lower cost (and lesser feature set) AnyConnect Essentials license (L-ASA-AC-E-55XX=, where 55XX is your model). The 5525 AnyConnect Essentials license list price is US$250. If you upgrade your Premium tier it is on the order of $40-50 per user list price (sold in increments of 10, 25, 50, 100 etc.)

Feature differences between Essentials and Premium are listed here. (and in the data sheet here)

You can also use the old Cisco IPsec VPN client without (or I should say independent of) any AnyConnect license. However it's nearing End of Life and may give you other problems going forward on Windows 8+, new OS X etc.

[Steven Williams]

My essentials is marked as disabled. My premium is 2. So I can only assume that the 750 that I have is for the old Cisco IPsec VPN client which is going bye bye.

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

Correct.

While it can work fine with the newer ASA versions, the final software maintenance for the old VPN client was last summer. Reference. (The last actual release - 5.0.07.0440 - was in March 2011.)

[Steven Williams]

I myself had to switch to anyconnect because of the Windows 8 issues I had. Thanks for the clearification.

[Marvin Rhoads]

You're welcome. Please rate or mark your question as answered if it is.