Community Firmware Version Recommendations (Q1, 2025)

[Knowguy]

I have frequented this forum lately to get opinions on recommended firmware versions. I would like to start a conversation for us to post in our current reccommeneded MX firmware versions here in an attempt to help everyone in picking a new firmware when having issues with their current.

As of today 2/11/2025, 18.211.3 it is my this is the best choice for most.

18.211.4 - Causing reboots.

18.211.5 - Causing AnyConnect issues.

18.211.5.1 - Not hearing much, I have never needed to  move to a X.X.X.Y release 

Please feel free to chime in and correct me and or discuss moving recommendations.

Love to get all the help I can in making these moves so that we don't have to revert after running into new firmware issues.

May need to start a new post every couple months to keep this clean. Feel free to 

[RaphaelL]

From what I could test in my lab and on some site MX 19.1.X looks very solid so far. Not using AnyConnect but 90% of the MX features and so far so good. 

[Knowguy]

Way too scared to pull the trigger on that. I love that the intent was to use Version 19 to correct all of the Non-Meraki VPN issues.... have you tested any of that?

[RaphaelL]

Yes. The NMVPN issue that I had is fixed

[RWelch]

MX19.1.7.1 has been solid for my networks consisting of MX75s, MX95s and MX105s to include NMVPN scenarios.

I tend to test MX releases in non production networks to evaluate MX releases for how my networks are configured and to avoid production networks from experiencing outages or random reboots.

I currently have one production MX105 running MX18.211.4 at the moment which gives me this firmware status WARNING.

 
By clicking on the firmware status notice, you can see that my network will upgrade on 7/15/2025 if I don't manually upgrade prior to that date.  I tend to test firmware releases well before those update dates arrive in order to be able to decide if I want to upgrade to stable release MX18.211.5.1 or stable release candidate MX19.1.7.1.   Most all of my networks today are running MX19.1.7.1 without issues/problems.

[RaphaelL]

1 network warning , I wish I could ever see that in my org : 

😭

[cmr]

@RaphaelL just multi select and hit upgrade now on them all.  What can go wrong 😈

[jphamwd]

18.211.4 - for us was causing AnyConnect clients to randomly lose all outbound traffic both AutoVPN and internet bound traffic and the client itself stayed connected.

.2 or .3 also caused random reboots for us which support turned off multicore to fix that.  Yesterday we upgraded to 18.211.5.1 so not enough bake time to tell if it fixed the AnyConnect issues.  

[cmr]

I've been using 19.x since it was released as I never got on with the 18.x release train.  17.x was good.

[Brash]

I personally stay on the stable firmware train in production and generally keep up to date within 1-2 weeks of releases.

I'd argue that it's not particularly feasible to get version recommendations from the community.

I don't think one single version will run perfectly across all platforms and all use-cases.

The best thing to do is look at the known issues in the release notes and the fixed issues in the release notes after (if you're not aiming for the latest version) to determine what's applicable to you and what's not.

[Knowguy]

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I don't think one single version will run perfectly across all platforms and all use-cases.

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This is the exact reason for reaching out to the community for input. 

Stable for Meraki in experience does not equate to stable.

If you have been fighting Non-Meraki VPN battles for he past year you would feel my pain.

Using Meraki's release notes and seeing the Known Issues section that grows and grows and doesn't change much is why I don't trust the labelling of "Stable".

Essentially by moving to their labelled "Stable" version shortly after release you are beta testing it for them. Just my opinion, but I also manage 100s of separate customers with varying degrees of complexity and configuration requirements. 

[Network-Dude]

In our environment we have several older MX84 series and are limited to versioning installation. The sporadic reboots and other issues have caused major grief. The MX105 and higher MX-series still seem to have similar issues. I agree we try to stay away from anything labeled "stable" for awhile and by the time we move to deploy the "stable" version it's a newer version in place. We can spend weeks reading and reviewing the "Known Issues section within the Release Notes" The customer environments are truly the test dummies for Cisco Meraki development team.