Cisco ASA 5510 – Where did my gigabit ports go?!

I’m preparing some ASA 5510 firewalls at work which are going to replace two Cisco Pix firewalls. We ordered the ASA5510-SEC-BUN-K9 because we need failover and the gigabit ports. I unpacked the firewall and booted it up but when I tried to set the speed on my interfaces only 100 Mbit was available. Cisco, what did you do to my gigabit ports?

I phoned the reseller and asked why they had sent me devices without gigabit ports but he said that only the license is different for the ASA 5510, there are no hardware differences. It turned out he was right. The software installed on the firewall was 7.0(2) which is kind of old. I found a release note for 7.2(3) which had the added feature of gigabit ports. This is only available for ethernet0/0 and 0/1 though I guess the other two ports are probaly able to do gig also but Cisco doesn’t want to do that. I upgraded the firewall to 8.3(2) and I had my gigabit ports 🙂 It would be nice if Cisco mentioned something about this but maybe this is known to people who are more in to the firewall world. This is the release note.

New Features

This section lists the new features for Version 7.2(3). All new features are supported in ASDM 5.2(3).
ASA 5510 Security Plus License Allows Gigabit Ethernet for Port 0 and 1
The ASA 5510 adaptive security appliance now has the security plus license to enable GE (Gigabit Ethernet) for port 0 and 1. If you upgrade the license from base to security plus, the capacity of the external port Ethernet0/0 and Ethernet0/1 increases from the original FE (Fast Ethernet) (100 Mbps) to GE (1000 Mbps). The interface names will remain Ethernet 0/0 and Ethernet 0/1. Use the speed command to change the speed on the interface and use the show interface command to see what speed is currently configured for each interface.