Recommendations R80.30 or R80.40 SMS and VSX

[Julian_Sanchez]

Hello Guys, 

I would like to know your experience or your recommendations about their jobs or upgrades, in what is the version more stable?

Check Point recommend R80.40 as default version, however, I dont know what are their experiences with this version in SMS and VSX. I have used R80.30 for long time in another clients and for me is OK. But I have now a customer with R80.20 in SMS and R77 in VSX. 

I hope you can give me or share me your experience, I read that in R80.40 JH 102 have some issues, but I dont sure. 

Regards,

Julian S.

[PhoneBoy]

The feedback on R81 Management so far is very positive (R80.40 also good).
On the gateway, in terms of quality, R80.40 and R81 should be similar and whether you use one or the other comes down to necessary features. 

[genisis__]

R80.40 with JHFA102 as a minimum seems to be ok, at least for me.  If your running R77.x defo move up to R80.40 with JHFA102, but of course plan and check for any specific hardware requirements, do a clean build!

I've not really used R81 yet so can't comment, but as Dameon states it really depends on features your after.  I suspect if you have high end appliances (30 cores plus) then something like dynamic dispatcher is a useful feature which is available on Gateways (not VSX at the moment).

Other features I'm looking forward to seeing in action are : NAT Hit count, accelerated policy push, and multiple policy push at the same time (R81).

[Julian_Sanchez]

I have another client with R80.40 and JBFA and for me seems ok, altought I heard some issues too. 

I havent used R81 too. But maybe I dont believed that use for now. 

[Kaspars_Zibarts]

All depends on size and how critical is the environment. SMS should be very stable with R80.40 as take version is above 100 now. If you feel more open to risk some issues then R81 sounds tempting

As for VSX - have two VSLS clusters running R80.40, both had minor issues during upgrade. Throughput is less than 15Gbps. But the last HA cluster that's running above 30Gbps we were forced to roll back after one week due to CPU issues. Planning another attempt now.

Here are my write-ups

https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/Security-Gateways/Problems-with-large-VSX-platforms-running-R80-... 

https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/Security-Gateways/VSX-appliance-upgrade-to-R80-40-T78-first-impr...