Find out what is new and exciting in the 9.3 ASA code releases thus far.
If you are as old as me, you are probably equally as surprised to see that we are already in 9.3 code releases for the Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) from Cisco Systems. In this post, I will run down the most exciting new features available for us. Please note that this post is organized by exact code release version. This is not a complete list of new features, but it hits what I believe are the most exciting.
Keep in mind that if you are using the ASA 5505, you are out of luck for these new features. ASA Version 9.2 was the final release for the ASA 5505.
The Windows NT AAA server was finally deprecated in ASA Version 9.3. The Windows NT AAA server is no longer supported.
9.3(1)
- SIP, SCCP, and TLS Proxy support for IPv6
- Support for Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.6
- Transactional Commit Model on rule engine for access groups and NAT
- XenDesktop 7 Support for clientless SSL VPN
- AnyConnect Custom Attribute Enhancements
- TrustSec SGT Assignment for VPN
- ASP Load Balancing
- BGP support for ASA clustering
- BGP support for nonstop forwarding
- OSPF Support for Non-Stop Forwarding (NSF)
- Layer 2 Security Group Tag Imposition
9.3(2)
- Support for ASA image signing and verification
- SIP support for Trust Verification Services, NAT66, CUCM 10.5, and model 8831 phones
- Unified Communications support for CUCM 10.5
- Browser support for Citrix VDI
- Clientless SSL VPN for Mac OSX 10.9
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.2 support
- Lock configuration changes on the standby unit or standby context in a failover pair
- ASA clustering inter-site deployment in transparent mode with the ASA cluster firewalling between inside networks
- You can group interfaces together into a traffic zone to accomplish traffic load balancing
- BGP support for IPv6
- System backup and restore
Some of these features could certainly warrant their own posts here in Networking Nuggets of Knowledge, so I will be sure to do that in the future. Looks for those blog entries soon and, and as always, I hope this post was informative.
