What is a GA release?

Summary

Explanation of GA vs MR releases and how to choose, what to run

Question

Customer Environment

Smart Zone, Zone Director, SZ/vSZ, ZD

Resolution

GA means "General Availability" and signifies that it's the first version of a major release that we publish to the Support website.
GA releases will be numbered like 9.9.0.0.212 - that bold zero indicates it's the first release.
Subsequent Maintenance Releases (MR's) would be numbered like 9.9.1.0.xx, 9.9.2.0.xx, etc.

MR's include fixes that either were identified too late to make it into the GA build but were not considered blockers*"or include fixes to issues identified after the release.
*Blockers are so named because they "block" the release when they are deemed too impacting to allow the release.

It's our goal that the majority of customers are able to run a GA release in production without concerns.
We continually refine our blocker criteria and QA procedures to ensure the highest possible release quality.

However, if you don't need new AP model support or features introduced in the latest GA, then a more conservative stance would be to use the latest MR of the previous release.
For example, 9.8.2.0.15 MR has had more "soak time" and may contain newer bug fixes than the 9.9 GA, and therefore we can assign a higher confidence to recommend it.

All releases of firmware include Release Notes, with supported hardware platform, upgrade path, and known issues.

Article Number:
000002490

Updated:
September 15, 2020 03:09 PM (about 4 years ago)

Tags:
Firmware, System Network Management, ZoneDirector

Votes:
6

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