R81 is now available (Questions and Answers)

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

R81 is now available. More read here sk166715.

R81 Release Notes	link
What's New in R81	link
Check Point R81 Known Limitations	link
Download R81	link
R81 Upgrade Map	link
SmartConsole	Check Point R80.x Cloud Demo (sk103431) Portable SmartConsole for R80.x (sk116158)
Check Point R81 Resolved Issues	link

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

21-Okt-2020
R81 GA sk166715 is publicly available since yesterday:

The downloads section states “COMING SOON”.

When will the downloads for R81 available?

[Christian_Wagen]

We have waited a long time.

I will test it in the LAB in the next days 🙂

[mats]

nice news

[red_tomato]

Installed on the first 6000 appliance. Works fine.

Great job Check Point guys.

[onur]

Is the recommendation to use this version already productive?

[Hugo_vd_Kooij]

Right. As ever I went into this feet first.

Doing an in-place upgrade looks rather easy. But after the reboot there is still a lot to be done and you should pick a short lunch after that as th system is doing a lot of stuff in the background while it seems to be up rather fast at first glance.

Not sure what is the recommended way to keep tabs on it's progress yet.

api status is among them I guess.

[RamGuy239]

Already upgraded our own environment and the improvements to how the $FWDIR/scripts/migrate_server seems to be handling things in a much more verbose way providing a lot of additional feedback and a better understanding of what is going on during a management server upgrade is really nice. Much better when compared to the old $FWDIR/bin/upgrade_tools/migrate.

Did also test the new major upgrade functionality within Smart Console. It seems to be more or less the same as utilising Central Deployment Tool (CDT) but it's much more user-friendly to have it through Smart Console and as a part of the GUI compared to preparing it through SSH. Worked flawlessly for our small and simple environment running a R80.40 HA-cluster on Open Server.

What does "In addition, the Scalable Platform software is now aligned with the R81 Cyber Security Platform bringing feature parity to CheckPoint Maestro" really entail? I don't quite understand this one? I can't find anything in the documentation pointing towards R81 being compatible with Scaleable Platform? And there is nothing in the Maestro Secure Knowledge articles showing anything new in regards to the release of R81. There is no new on-going jumbo hotfix takes for neither R80.20SP or R80.30SP for Maestro Gateways or anything. Could you please explain what the release of R81 bring to Scaleable Platform and Maestro?

Best regards,
Thomas Teige
Orange Cyberdefense Norway

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Some questions are still open:

- When will the Scalable Platforms follow?
- When will R81 for SMB applications follow?
- Will there be a documentation package with all PDF documents available in one tgz file

[Shirleyh]

Hi,

- Scalable platforms version it is merged with main train R81 and currently in Early Availability program.

- It is not clear to me wha you ask about SMB, please explain.

- PDF in tgz file will be available later today

Thanks!

[Shirleyh]

Hi,

- Scalable platforms version it is merged with main train R81 and currently in Early Availability program.

- It is not clear to me wha you ask about SMB, please explain.

- PDF in tgz file will be available later today

Thanks!

[PhoneBoy]

The question is: when we will see a R81-based version for SMB appliances (1500 series)?

[Amir_Ayalon]

Hi

When SMB is doing alignment, this is just base alignment, meaning, although we are align to R80.20, we still merge a lot of content (features and bug fixes) from more advanced versions. (and of course adding the unique features which are more related to embedded Gaia (Access, WiFi, Dsl, LTE, locally managed UI, etc.)

So, calling it "R80.20 align", might be confusing, (we actually initially thought of a completely different naming scheme, so we would avoid such confusion).. 

we are constantly adding capabilities from more advanced version, and every ~2 years we perform a bigger alignment to base.

So R81 alignment (or R8x alignment ) would occur, but not in the near future.

Thanks

[PhoneBoy]

It's good that I had the right idea of how this worked 🙂
For those asking about an R81 version of SMB, it's better to ask about specific features versus getting hung up on the exact version number.

[MarioB_1]

Is there any plan to support Inbound TLS decryption on SMB (1500 series) appliances?

[Barel_Tkach]

No plans right now - you can file an RFE.

[choudharyl]

Dear All,

i have upgraded the 15600 gateway Appliance to R81, but we are facing a lot of Issue with R81. the problem are as follows:->

1) SnapShot issues.(Cannot create Snapshot it will show the snapshot is creating but at last it disappeared very weard)

2) Appliance is going down Automatically when there is a traffic it is random , when it is down you cannot see your gateway, it freezed  you have to go physically to see the devices and you will notice it is doing something,, when you connect to console nothing showing in the screen, but if you leave it like this it will come back online after 2-3 hours . so weard. 

3) i have rolled back to R80.40 .. let us see what CP is doing to fix this issue, i opened the case but still no luck Support are saying might be the Corrupted IOS image..

let me know if anybody facing the same issue, i did with my two appliance it is the same behavior. but smart -1 appliance working well, with R81.

Lav Kumar

[choudharyl]

Also just to let you know, i have done clean install the R81 to the 15600 Appliance , the behavior is same, when you have traffic it works for sometime than it is going down ( means it looses the connection to MGMT, all the interfaces were down) when you try to see through console it is blank screen but it is coming back automatically after 1-2 hours. so weird ..behavior.

Lav

[_Val_]

@choudharyl Check if you have CPU spikes on that machine. In any case, open a support call with TAC, this is not normal, and most probably not related to the version you are running.

[_Val_]

@MarioB_1 I would be very surprised if we ever had such plans. SMB appliances are very limited in terms of performance.

[HeikoAnkenbrand]

Hi @Shirleyh,

Thanks, it is now available.

[Paul_Hagyard]

Hi,

There are a few things in the first time configuration wizard which are not (or not well) documented.

Looking at the output of config_system -l there are the following new attributes:

#########################################################################

#                                                                       #

#                       Scalable Platforms parameters                   #

#                                                                       #

#    For keys below set "true"/"false" after '='  within the quotes     #

#########################################################################

# Optional parameter, if not specified the default is false

install_security_vsx=

sg_cluster_id=

These parameters do not appear in the install/upgrade guide. I've installed VSX many times by building a standard gateway and then using SmartConsole to build a VSX gateway from it, what does "install_security_vsx" do?

I'm guessing sg_cluster_id is for scalable gateways - I thought R80.40+ did away with cluster IDs?

In the web UI the "Deployment options" page presents. Is there a way to invoke this from the CLI? The install/upgrade guide says "These options appear
(applies only to Check Point appliances that you configured as a Security Gateway)" - if they only apply to appliances, why do they also appear on an open server install?

When will install from cloud be supported for open servers?

Is recovery from existing snapshot supported for open servers?

Cheers,

Paul

[Reimar_W]

nice