RED unified firmware - please explain

Because of the differing hardware and development stages of RED throughout it's lifecycle until recently we had been supporting multiple different firmwares. Unified firmware brings together the code trains into one release which means it is simpler to maintain and update.

The BETA tag was introduced in 17.5 and is now renamed Unified. All models are supported except RED10 which is EoL some years.

Thanks for the clarification PMStuart

I'll just mention when I enabled it (XG 18.0.1) the green popup message still referenced BETA firmware was being enabled. Might be something the UI team missed.

Do you know what is the expected behaviour of the RED10 devices? After the upgrade to 18 and enabled the unified firmware, we have a RED10 that is still working and we still have the option of adding them in the UI.

Thanks for the clarification PMStuart

I'll just mention when I enabled it (XG 18.0.1) the green popup message still referenced BETA firmware was being enabled. Might be something the UI team missed.

Do you know what is the expected behaviour of the RED10 devices? After the upgrade to 18 and enabled the unified firmware, we have a RED10 that is still working and we still have the option of adding them in the UI.

balletbob, did you by any chance grab a screenshot of the popup? v18MR1 was the first build to support SD-RED20 and 60, the switch of terminology to Unified should have happened at the same time. It would be helpful if you did have a screengrab therefore.

RED10 has been End of Life and Support since 1st November 2018, as such the support for RED10 in SFOS should have been removed at the first release after this point. We delayed the removal of support in SFOS however to give our Customers the ability to replace these devices in a controlled fashion.

We are now almost 2 years after the end of support date (5 years after end of sale) and so in v18 MR3 RED10 support has been removed from the product. You can upgrade RED10 to its newer equivalent which is SD-RED 20 - it has all the same functionality (in fact more)

For reference the Sophos Retirement Calendar is available at https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KB-000035279?language=en_US#sophosred and the SD-RED datasheet is available at https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/pdfs/factsheets/sophos-sd-red-ds.pdf

After reading this thread yesterday I toggled the "Unified" firmware and can confirm I saw the same green popup message at the top of the screen that referenced BETA firmware, this was on MR3.  

Thank you Bill, I'll contact the UI team about that.

balletbob thank you also for your report.

This is confirmed as an issue and being tracked as NC-64010

Thank you both for bringing this to our attention.

Hello, just want to verify that you have a RED 10 on XG V18?...we have a lot of RED 10 deployments and we need to upgrade the RED firmware for 3.0.0.2?...can you confirm your RED firmware in the pattern updates? This will be a big help from us...

I'm on 18 MR3 with RED Firmware 3.0.002 with unified firmware ticked and our RED10 no longer connects as I expected.
As others have mentioned, RED 10 is end of life so you're going to need to replace them or not apply any further firmware updates.

Thank you for the quick response, We are on 17.5 MR14 on ur XG, then we have some SD-RED to deploy, but the idea is add the new SD-RED's, before removing the RED 10's, but  our XG RED firmware is 2.0.015, and Sophos said it needs to be on 3.0.00x to support  the new SD-RED's, we don't want downtime as we migrate to the new SD-RED...any ideas anyone?

This is the pop-up that disappears quite rapidly, even on MR4.

We are aware of this UI issue and it will be fixed. I dont have a release for it at this time. I will try to find out from Engineering when this will be resolved.

UPDATE: Fix is planned for MR5

Stuart