Upgrading RAM higher than 4GB in 4400 appliance

[Obiwan1968]

I have an 4400 appliance which is EoL in June 2022. Question, the appliance has 4GB RAM, according to tech sheet no upgrade is possible, anyone tried with common memory to get out more than 4GB? According to TAC the R80.30/R80.40 is not supported with 4400 and 4GB, so there is not a lot to loose trying this out?

Thanks for the feedback

[Chris_Atkinson · Accepted solution]

Please check availability with your local office, refer:

https://downloads.checkpoint.com/dc/download.htm?ID=27160

[Timothy_Hall]

If you check out the blog post below, someone is upgrading a 4800 with 2 4GB sticks for 8GB total of RAM.  Looks like they are DDR3 UB-DIMM 1066/4GB desktop modules which should be pretty cheap and readily available.

https://suprafortix.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/4000-series-checkpoint-firewall-ram-upgrade/

If the 4400 has just one slot I doubt you will be able to go beyond 4GB.

[Obiwan1968]

Thanks, I have seen this too, On the datasheet they only mentioned 8GB for the 4800, this made me thinking. The example I am having here is a 4000, which looks different. So I going to buy some DIMM

[Bob_Zimmerman]

I do most of my development work on a 2200 running as a standalone. It has two RAM slots, and each accepts a 4 GB DDR3 SO-DIMM for 8 GB total. I would be surprised if the 4400 couldn't at least match it.

I would pop the box open to verify the type of RAM it takes. dmidecode on the 2200 says it takes DDR2, but it definitely only takes DDR3.

[PhoneBoy]

For warranty purposes, some appliances are considered “sealed units” and do not allow for end users to upgrade components like RAM and HDD.
That said, most of the appliances (except the SMB ones) do have upgradable components inside.
The extent you’ll be able to upgrade the units will vary.
Should you go that route, you forgo further support/RMA on the appliance. 

[Obiwan1968]

Checkpoint told me there is End of Sales for the 4400, so they do not provide me any additional RAM, but I could be a new appliance for sure. So, not a lot to loose.

[net-harry]

Hi,

Could someone confirm that R80.40 is not supported for the 4400 appliances? We have a couple of 4400s that are only running the firewall blade on R77.30 that we were planning to upgrade to R80.40.

Thanks for your help!

Harry

[Obiwan1968]

TAC told me that R80.30 and R80.40 is not supported on 4400 with ONLY 4GB, with 8GB it should work. At least this is what they told me.

I just have an appliance here and check that DDR3 UB DIMM 1333 /4GB  is integrated. I am going to buy a second one and try out if it is supported and if it than works with 80.40

I was running on a 4400 with 4GB and R80.30, it works, but was not that fast.

[net-harry]

Thanks @Obiwan1968 . My 4400s also only have 4 GB. Since we only use the firewall blade on those security gateways I was hoping that 4 GB would be sufficient also to run R80.40. Does Check Point officially state that R80.40 is not support on 4400s with 4GB or was this "just" a TAC recommendation?

[Obiwan1968]

The TAC told me due to the fact that R80.30 and R80.40 are officially not supported on 4400 with 4GB I close the ticket/case, I therefore cannot help you. BOING TelCo finished and the ticket was closed.

[Bob_Zimmerman]

So this gets into how asking whether something is "supported" is kind of ambiguous. There are two questions it could mean:

1. If I try to do this and run into problems, will tech support help me?
2. If I try to do this, will it work?

For question 1, tech support won't help run R80.40 on the box, and they won't help install more RAM.

For question 2, installing more RAM should work, and R80.40 on that hardware should work. You won't get help from the vendor if it doesn't, though.

[Timothy_Hall]

The Open Server Requirements portion of the R80.40 release notes state that the bare minimum requirements are 2 cores and 4GB of RAM for a Security Gateway.  So it should work assuming that Check Point does not explicitly block fresh installation on this particular hardware.  I do know for a fact that with less than 4GB of RAM Gaia 3.10 won't even boot, I ran into this in VMWare.  With just the Firewall and IPSec VPN blades you should be OK, perhaps APCL/URLF as well but any form of Threat Prevention would not be advisable.

[net-harry]

Thanks @Obiwan1968, @Bob_Zimmerman and @Timothy_Hall  for your help. I am now thinking that it might be better for us to upgrade our 4400s with 4 GB to R80.20, since I assume this version is supported. Could someone confirm?

Thanks again for your help!

[Timothy_Hall]

According to the Enterprise Support Timeline, R80.40 is supported on the 4400 and I don't see any mention of needing 8GB:

https://www.checkpoint.com/support-services/support-life-cycle-policy/#appliances-support

[PhoneBoy]

For gateway only, 4GB should work.
For a standalone gateway (with management), 8GB is the bare minimum.