Heads Up - New enrolments now require agent 3.7.2+

[ConnorL]

Hey Meraki Community - hope you're doing well! 👋🏻 

As part of our ongoing security & feature enhancements, since April 2024 we have been upgrading older Meraki SM Windows & macOS agents, the version depends on the OS version:

• Windows agents will be upgraded to v3.7.2
• Agents on devices running versions of macOS below 10.15 will upgrade to v3.8.3. 
  Agents on devices running macOS 10.15+, will upgrade to v4.1.4.

You will see a banner on Dashboard alerting you of this, and for more information & FAQ I recommend reading the KB: "Systems Manager Agent Upgrade 2024" 

This is a heads-up we now require Meraki agent version 3.7.2 (Win) & 3.8.3 (Mac) and above for new enrollments, new enrollments on older versions of the Windows/macOS agent will fail. If you have any questions, please reply or reach out to Meraki Support. 

Cheers!

Connor 👋🏻 

[BHC_RESORTS]

@ConnorL is there any reason why fully supported operating systems like Server 2016 and 2019 are no longer supported in systems manager 4.0+?

[ConnorL]

Mainstream support by Microsoft for Server 2016 ended in January 2022 and Server 2019 in January 2024. For these, you can continue to use version 3.7.2 of the agent.

[BHC_RESORTS]

@ConnorL true, but extended support for Server 2016 is 2027, and for Server 2019 it's 2029. That would be like Meraki no longer supporting a product once it is end of sale instead of end of support. A lot of orgs don't upgrade every server OS when it is released, and for compliance extended support is just as good as mainstream support as it still receives security updates.

It seems an arbitrary thing to remove support for. Server 2019's lifecycle still has 5 years left.

[BHC_RESORTS]

@ConnorL now it shows in the most recent change log that Windows Server is no longer supported at all. Why?

[Update] Removed support for Windows Server. 

[MattMorg]

We plan to keep Windows Server supported on 3.7.2 (Windows Server 2016-2019) or 4.1.1 (Windows Server 2022) for now, and may evaluate adding Windows Server back on newer builds in the future. We know there are some important Windows Server use cases and have no plans to entirely drop it at the moment, so please stay on Agent versions 3.7.2 or 4.1.1 for Windows Server support. 

[BHC_RESORTS]

That's good, as we have quite a few licenses that may not have been usable in the future, and since you can't value shift them on an EA, would have just been worthless. The codebase between Windows 10/Windows Server 2* is rapidly converging, so it seems very odd to exclude.