Cisco Cisco ASA 5580 Adaptive Security Appliance Release Notes

See the following table for the upgrade path for your version.

There are no special requirements for Zero Downtime Upgrades for failover.

For detailed steps about upgrading, see the 

Stackable time-based 
licenses

Time-based licenses are now stackable. In many cases, you might need to renew your 
time-based license and have a seamless transition from the old license to the new one. For 
features that are only available with a time-based license, it is especially important that the 
license not expire before you can apply the new license. The adaptive security appliance allows 
you to stack time-based licenses so you do not have to worry about the license expiring or about 
losing time on your licenses because you installed the new one early. For licenses with 
numerical tiers, stacking is only supported for licenses with the same capacity, for example, 
two 1000-session SSL VPN licenses. You can view the state of the licenses using the show 
activation-key command.

Intercompany Media Engine 
License

The IME license was introduced.

Time-based licenses based 
on Uptime

Time-based licenses now count down according to the total uptime of the ASA; the system 
clock does not affect the license.

Multiple time-based licenses 
active at the same time

You can now install multiple time-based licenses, and have one license per feature active at a 
time.

The following commands were modified: show activation-key and show version.

Discrete activation and 
deactivation of time-based 
licenses.

You can now activate or deactivate time-based licenses using a command.

The following command was modified: activation-key [activate | deactivate].

Master Passphrase

The master passphrase feature allows you to securely store plain text passwords in encrypted 
format. It provides a master key that is used to universally encrypt or mask all passwords, 
without changing any functionality.

The following commands were introduced: key config-key password-encryption, password 
encryption aes.

8.2(x) and earlier

8.3(1) or later