Sophos Firewall: How to determine the base image version of the Sophos Firewall deployment in Azure and list the versions currently available on the Azure marketplace

Disclaimer: This information is provided as-is for the benefit of the Community. Please contact Sophos Professional Services if you require assistance with your specific environment.


Overview

Occasionally, you may be required to manually replicate an existing Sophos Firewall deployment configuration in Azure (as part of a recovery or to expand to a new region, for example).

Since the Sophos Firewall does not support importing configurations from a newer version into an older version of the OS, it’s useful to determine ahead of this operation what version your current Sophos Firewall deployment is using and what current version(s) of Sophos Firewall are available on the Azure Marketplace, so you can either deploy a matching version or upgrade your Sophos deployment to match the latest build before replicating the setup.

This article contains the following sections:

This applies to the following Sophos products and versions
Sophos Firewall

Prerequisites

  • These steps require the use of Azure Powershell. For instructions on how to install or update, see Microsoft’s documentation here: Install Azure PowerShell
  • The following steps assume that you have signed in to your Azure account on Azure Powershell (see: Sign in with Azure PowerShell) and have selected the appropriate subscriptions that the current Sophos deployment resides in (see: Get-AzureSubscription for instructions on listing your subscriptions and Select-AzureSubscription for instructions on selecting a subscription).

Determine the current Sophos deployment’s base image version

To find the Sophos deployment’s base image version, follow the steps below:

  1. Create a variable that contains information about your VM:
    $vm = GetAzVM -ResourceGroupName “<your Sophos machine’s Resource Group name>” -Name “<your Sophos machine’s name”>
  2. Extract the information from the created variable:
    $vm.StorageProfile.ImageReference

This will provide an output similar to the following image:

The image version used to deploy your original VM is “ExactVersion”.

List the available Sophos release versions on Azure Marketplace

To get a full list of all the available versions of the Sophos Firewall on the Azure marketplace, run the following command:

Get-AzVMImage -Location "<your region> " -PublisherName "sophos" -Offer "sophos-Sophos" -Sku "<relevant SKU>"

Where Location should be written out (for example “West US” or “Canada Central”), and the available skus are “byol” and “payg-new”.

Please note that this command is case-sensitive (BYOL and BYOL aren’t the same value).

When run correctly, this will provide an output similar to the following image:

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Horizontal Line, Grammar
[edited by: emmosophos at 6:45 PM (GMT -8) on 16 Nov 2023]