Threat Defense Virtual Performance Tier Licensing Guidelines and Limitations

Please keep the following guidelines and limitations in mind when licensing your threat defense virtual device.

  • The threat defense virtual supports performance-tiered licensing that provides different throughput levels and VPN connection limits based on deployment requirements.

  • Any threat defense virtual license can be used on any supported threat defense virtual core/memory configuration. This allows the threat defense virtual customers to run on a wide variety of VM resource footprints.

  • You can select a performance tier when you deploy the threat defense virtual, whether your device is in evaluation mode or is already registered with Cisco Smart Software Manager.

    Note

    Make sure your Smart Licensing account contains the available licenses you need. It’s important to choose the tier that matches the license you have in your account. If you are upgrading your threat defense virtual to Version 7.0, you can choose FTDv - Variable to maintain your current license compliance. Your threat defense virtual continues to perform with session limits based on your device capabilities (number of cores/RAM).

  • The default performance tier is FTDv50 when deploying a new threat defense virtual device, or when provisioning the threat defense virtual using the REST API.

  • Essentials licenses are subscription-based and mapped to performance tiers. Your virtual account needs to have the Essentials license entitlements for the threat defense virtual devices, as well as for IPS, Malware Defense, and URL Filtering licenses.

  • Each HA peer consumes one entitlement, and the entitlements on each HA peer must match, including Essentials license.

  • A change in performance tier for an HA pair should be applied to the primary peer.

  • You assign feature licenses to the cluster as a whole, not to individual nodes. However, each node of the cluster consumes a separate license for each feature. The clustering feature itself does not require any licenses.

  • Universal PLR licensing is applied to each device in an HA pair separately. The secondary device will not automatically mirror the performance tier of the primary device. It must be updated manually.