ASA 8.3 released!

I’m going here to show some of the new features that comes with!
Some are good… and others not ^^

Let’s start with the bad news

Memory Upgrade

To upgrade your ASA with 8.3 release, you will need to upgrade your hardware.
Memory requirement is more than the double default memory. 512 Mb for a 5505, 1GB for 5510 …

You will still be able to install the new release, but you’ll get some error message in CLI and in ASDM. The full features set will be not supported until you’ll get some memory.

Licencing Features

With the ASA ( and IOS 15.0 ) comes the new licensing feature. Time-based licences are required
now to unblock features.

The good news is that time-based licenses are stackable.
let’s say you purchased a licence for 1 one year, you won’t have to wait the last day to renew your licence. The count will be just incremented using your new licence.

You can also use multiples licenses at the same time and if you do not require a feature anymore, you can deactivate it and reactivate later.

Master Passphrase

The Master Passphrase is not new for IOS. This feature is the same as the IOS command service password-encryption. But instead of type 7, you will
get with ASA an encryption using AES.

Monitoring

High Performance Monitoring for ASDM is the ability to check the inside hosts connections ( who and how much )

to set it up :

ciscoasa(config)#hpm topn enable

Firewall features

New interface is coming! the global one! You can configure access-list and others things in a global way, not only in an interface-specific way

NAT can be configured directly in the network object

And to finish, the NAT configuration is… quite simple as how we did earlier!

Others new features here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/asa/asa83/release/notes/asarn83.html