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3x OS Upgrade Limit on Unlicensed Firewall

JasP

I am aware that you are limited to 3 OS upgrades for an unlicensed firewall.

Does this limit get reset once you license the firewall? Or is is hard set for the lifetime of the hardware?

I remember when this change was announced but don't think this was mentioned.



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[edited by: Raphael Alganes at 10:59 AM (GMT -7) on 13 Mar 2025]
  • +1

    Keep in mind: Beside 3 Firmware Upgrade limit, you will loose Central as well:  Sophos Firewall: License Compliance in 2025 

    If you get a license (Enhance Support), you will not reset but simply lift this restriction. Once the Subscription is expired again, you fall back to the count you had before. 

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    • 0 in reply to LuCar Toni

      So it is the lifetime of the hardware.

      I'm not bothered by the other 2025 changes as they aren't relevant to us but we will alter our practice to avoid the 3 upgrade limit.

      As an MSP, we continue to own the hardware when we deploy a firewall to a customer. It is not uncommon to redeploy that hardware when it has been decommissioned to a new site and part of that process is to upgrade it to the latest firmware before we start to set it up. At this stage it is unlicensed so an upgrade will eat into our 3x limit.

      In future we will make sure we always just wipe and update from an ISO image.

      This would be our normal process anyway but we have a firewall that we started a deployment on and then the project got postponed. Now it is going ahead again we upgraded the firmware first (so using one of our three limited upgrades) to SFOS 21.0.1 MR-1-Build237. Hence the question now that SFOS 21.0.1 MR-1-Build272 has been released. We don't want to use another limited upgrade if the limit is lifetime of the hardware and we don't want to license the firewall until we are in a position to start billing the customer for it. In this case, we will continue the setup with the current OS and upgrade once the firewall is deployed and licensed.

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