Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers Licensing Quick Reference

Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers Licensing Quick Reference

• Advantage is the “upper” suite on top of Essentials
  Under the Flexible Consumption Model (FCM), you have two suites: Essentials and Advantage. Advantage includes everything in Essentials plus additional advanced routing and management features to improve applications and network resilience. (Cisco)

• Use Advantage when you need advanced L3 / VPN / service features
  Essentials covers the fundamental transport and base IOS XR routing/management. Advantage licenses are required on top of Essentials for ports that use advanced features (the example Cisco calls out is things like L3VPN). (Cisco)

• Licensed per bandwidth (per 100G/400G), not per generic “feature pack”
  Advantage RTU licenses are bandwidth-based (for example ADV-ED-100G-RTU1), and they’re consumed according to the amount of active 100G bandwidth on the box. Essentials uses ESS-ED-100G-RTU1 in the same way. (Cisco)

• For ASR 9901 specifically, FCM + Advantage is supported from XR 7.3.1
  The ASR-9901 is explicitly listed as supported hardware for the Flexible Consumption Model, meaning you can run it with Essentials/Advantage suites under FCM rather than purely traditional licensing. (Cisco)

• Tracking license plus Advantage/Essentials (legacy behavior)
  ASR-9901 has a hardware tracking license (ASR-9901-TRK) listed in the FCM tables. Tracking licenses exist purely to represent the hardware in licensing, while Essentials/Advantage carry the feature entitlements. Starting with Release 24.3.1, tracking licenses are no longer used going forward. (Cisco)

• SIA is what actually lets you use Advantage and keeps you current
  A Software Innovation Access (SIA) subscription is required to consume Advantage and Essentials RTU licenses. SIA gives you:

  • rights to use the Advantage/Essentials RTUs

  • ongoing access to new features, bug fixes, and security updates

  • portability of those RTUs between devices in the same product family
    This is a key part of the value of running Advantage on ASR 9901. (Cisco)

• “Advantage with Essentials” combo SKUs simplify ordering
  Cisco has introduced combined “Advantage with Essentials” PIDs (e.g., ADN-ED-100G-RTU1) so you can buy a single entitlement that covers both Essentials and Advantage per 100G/400G, instead of ordering separate Essentials and Advantage pieces and upgrades. (Cisco)

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/iosxr/asr9000/licensing/article/asr-9000-licensing-reference.html