R77.30 - Support until May 2019

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Just a few more months and R77.30 is a thing of the past.

You can find more here:

Support Life Cycle Policy | Check Point Software 

Here the vote from Danny Jung to support extention:

Regards,

Heiko

[Maik]

I am still kind of curious when R80 will be released for the scaleable platform devices - seems R76.50 is supported until April 2021 for these appliances.

[aner_sagi]

Checkpoint should consider extending the support to another year. My impression is that r80.10 gateway is not implemented for majority of customers and many bugs not yet discovered. 

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

I've already had a few migrations to R80.10. I actually don't find that problematic. If there are new hotfixes Take_121 or ongoing takeTake_142 on it, it works very well.

Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator for R80.10 (R80_10_jumbo_hf) 

Regards,

Heiko

[Yuri_Slobodyany]

I'll agree with aner sagi in that Checkpoint should be more flexible with their EOS/EOL schedule to reflect the situation in the field. 

Some versions were so problematic (R75 which was understandable for the painful transition to Gaia), that they should have been retired much sooner than the set period. Yet other versions, like R77.30, should have a chance of longer support period because the situation in the Enterprises currently is such :

• 80-90% of the  firewalls in Ent LANs/perimeter are non R80 (mostly R77.30)  with no immediate plans to upgrade
• Major (only?) driving force to upgrade I see is purchasing the new UTMs which come pre-installed with R80
• "Problem"  of the R77.30 is that it is exceptionally good and stable firewall, and firewalls are not upgraded on 'Windows Tuesdays', therefore even if R80 is all good and fancy, it is not enough of a reason for clients to upgrade otherwise fully functioning firewall.
• The bottom line is that R77.30 is going for sure outlive the set support end date, including large account clients which will not take for an answer "Sorry, not supported anymore, go upgrade" and extending support officially would make life of Checkpoint Support and R&D/Partners/VARs easier in my opinion.

[Kaspars_Zibarts]

I can agree that R77.30 was a solid and reliable release. For one reason or another we upgraded whole network to R80.10 nearly a year ago. That includes multi domain management, regular firewalls and VSX and I would not look back. R80.10 has been equally solid for such a major change and brought some gems with it - API support, 64 bit VS support, FQDN objects, much more consistent GUI. I really can't wait to upgrade chassis too to get away from the "old" R76 code. As Heiko mentioned, with the latest ongoing jumbo it's as good as R77.30!

[AlekseiShelepov]

What do you plan to do when R80.20 will be released? As I understand, the only way to have new file system (xfs) is a clean install. This mostly applies for management servers.

[zsh]

I've been hearing "soon, any month not, before Q4" etc and that was since CPX in Nice 2.5 years ago...........:s

[Kaspars_Zibarts]

Ah, R80.20 we will wait for a while as this year we have no pressure to rush into it  last year upgrades were partially driven to deliver extra capacity on VSX / 64bit VS, more concurrent connections

[JozkoMrkvicka]

Waiting till R80.30 ....

... or till API can finally support cluster manipulation.

[Dorit_Dor]

We do support advanced upgrade.

A large customer is doing it now as we speak – migrating to 3.10 XFS.

[Danny]

This is great news. Thanks Dorit.

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Hi Dorit,

will it be a new installation where the GAIA config is taken over or are you working with a new partition with XFS? When changing from ext to XFS  it is only possible to create a new partition and copy the files. I'm just thinking about the disk space! Could cause problems if the customer has a no free partitions space for XFS.

Can you give us more detailed information here yet?

Regards

Heiko

[Ole_Jakobsen]

I have also upgraded to R80.10 the majority of places I work. For me we have had fewer problems than with R77.30. The upgrades include gateways, VSX, CloudGuard Iaas, management server, MDM and MLM.

I'm looking forward to R80.20 where all controller hotfixes and EndPoint mgmt is intergrated.

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

I am waiting for the following version

Regards,

Heiko

[Gera_Dorfman]

Hi Heiko,

It will be a completely new installation with new partition table and all partitions formatted with XFS. It's not possible to create a new partition only since we're also using GPT now instead of MBR. 

Gera

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Hi Gera,

THX, for this information.

Regards,

Heiko

[Jason_Dance]

Will R80.20 be released and enough takes available for stable operation before May 2019?  We're running R77.30.03 for endpoint management, and deprecating R77.30 kinda pulls the support rug out from under this configuration.

[Sal_Previtera]

R77.30 is stable enough, why mess up with a good thing....are you guys taken lesson from Ms.

What about small appliances running R77.20.xx before forcing everyone to R80.xx.....

Someone,  Please explain changes ( if any) in Licensing schemes from R77.30 to R80.xx...

[Dorit_Dor]

R80.20 first take (m1) was released. Soon comes r80.20 ga (already in release candidate, so if you want to join latest build, last chance to join the EA program and enjoy r&d escorted deployment)... from that point we will start Jumbo hot fixes like we have on R80.10...

Management wise, R80.20 is minor release to begin with, so it should be good immediately. Given that we have over 6 months to May, you shouldnt have any challenges. 

Dorit

[Dorit_Dor]

Support for small appliances is part of R80.20 and the small appliances themseves (branch 1xxx) are not required to be upgraded (they continued to be supported w their current version).

R80x management brings huge benefits over R77.30, ... feel free to read the whats new or join any of the sessions offered on Checkmates to learn more about it (if you arent clear “why”). 

[Sal_Previtera]

I am not disagreeing  with the benefits, there are many... and the one I am most interested the Cisco ISE and Checkpoint R88.20 integration, since we are mostly a Cisco shop.

A problem,  that I seem to encounter with each major version change, it is licensing....can you confirm that are "no License changes" on the migration from R77 to R80?

[Andy_Szymanowsk]

Is this talking about R77.30 on the Firewalls or R77.30 for Endpoint Security Server?

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

I don't understand why everyone has problems with R80.10 or R80.20EA. We have migrated many customer installations to R80.10. I have noticed only a few problems here. They were also just minor issues that were quickly fixed with Jumbo Hotfixes. Since some months I find this is a very stable version. I find here many good new  functions in the SmartConsole. The migration from R77.30 to R80.10 was also always problem-free. Have the courage to switch to R80.10. It's a great version and I'm awaiting R80.20 GA.

We can start a survey, which version you find better!

Here is the vote link:

Regards

Heiko

[Maarten_Sjouw]

They are supported but you cannot use the inline layers  as long as the embedded boxes themselves run R80.x

[Maarten_Sjouw]

I have a 3 server MDS setup with about 150 customers on it and have been moving customers from there to our R80.10 MDS over the last 8 months as needed. I cannot say I have had more then 2 Domains that went without problems after the move. We still have a full MDS backup at R&D as they are still searching for a problem with cloning policies.

So far I have moved around 10 Domains. For now I'm planning to move no more but to run an upgrade early next year from R77.30 to R80.20, the R80.10 MDS will be upgraded to the GA version when it has been out for about 2 months./

[JozkoMrkvicka]

Please raise RFE for this

[Dorit_Dor]

True about layers. Still there are many other benefits.

The small appliances will take longer time (started the effort but its a long effort)

[Kaspars_Zibarts]

I hear the pain Maarten.. and fully understand. I guess what we are trying to say is if one follows more standard approach of upgrading whole MDS at once (instead of doing one by one CMA approach) it seems to work fairly faultlessly. But can understand frustration.

[Gomboragchaa]

I always prefer the latest version with latest hotfix and waiting R80.20 official release. I think Check Point fix bugs quickly.