Check Point Life Cycle
by Toby Deemer
How to Read and Search the Support Life Cycle Documentation
This series of links can help you plan for a Check Point implementation, as well as an upgrade or refresh of a current Check Point infrastructure. Due to a long-standing product history, and having gone through a couple of different licensing models, figuring out hardware can sometimes be difficult with Check Point. Hopefully this information can help ease that process.
Using these links, you will find Check Point’s supported versions, and when applicable, their recommended upgrade path.
Check Point Enterprise Support Life Cycle Policy
http://www.checkpoint.com/services/lifecycle/index.html
Check Point Software Support Timeline
http://www.checkpoint.com/services/lifecycle/support-periods.html
Check Point Appliance Support Timeline
http://www.checkpoint.com/services/lifecycle/appliance-support.html
How to Find Out What Check Point Products are Supported on Your Hardware
http://www.checkpoint.com/services/techsupport/hcl/all.html
Check Point currently supports hardware from a specific set of vendors, apart from their branded appliances. An up to date list of supported platforms can be found here, including models from: Dell, HP, Fujitsu, IBM, Kontron, Lenovo, Sun, Supermicro, and Toshiba. Note that some models are only supported for certain functions or products, so pay attention to this list when deciding what hardware to choose for your Gateways, Management Servers, Connectra or Eventia hosts, etc.
How to Look Up Your NIC and Other Hardware Related Information
This tends to be more of an issue when ensuring the NICs in your chosen server are listed in the compatibility list, or for instance when you need to add more NICs to a host. On a typical *nix installation, you can run the command ifconfig to see a list of details on your host’s interfaces. The section you will want to note is: HWaddr f0:de:f1:xx:xx:xx
From the MAC address, we can see that this is an ethernet interface on a Lenovo machine, manufactured by Wistron InfoComm Co. According to the Hardware Compatibility List the NIC in my Lenovo laptop is not officially supported for Check Point installations. 
A handy resource to find out exactly who made your Dell or HP or Sun server’s NIC is here (http://hwaddress.com/) Input the first three segments of your MAC address, and it will query the known manufacturers and provide the info.
If you’re not familiar with MAC addresses, they’re the “hardware address”, “burned-in address”, “layer 2 address”, etc. Basically, it’s a unique ID that is only on your one specific piece of hardware.
Using the example MAC address aa:aa:aa:bb:bb:bb, we see that: Each MAC address has two sections; the first is comprised of the first three segments and are used to identify the manufacturer of the hardware. So we could see that aa:aa:aa indicates this NIC was made by “NIC Builders 1234, INC”. The last three segments simply are a combination that the manufacturer has not yet used with the particular manufacturer ID. Obviously, manufacturers can have multiple MAC prefixes (Cisco is listed at 159) so this gives them a wide range of MAC address space.
There may also come a time when you need to find a hardware serial number while remotely connected to a machine. The more important item here is to know that Check Point ties licensing to primary NIC MAC address, so if you can run ifconfig, you have what you need. But if you also happen to ever need your system’s serial number, you can try this:
dmidecode | grep Serial
This will show your system’s main serial number usually as the first entry, and depending on how your hardware vendor has laid out their information, may also show you the serial for the baseboard for other
components.
Using both the software support timelines and the hardware compatibility list, you can achieve a couple of key goals: you can get as much life as possible out of existing hardware, and you can plan future installations or upgrades to get the best possible combination of features and long term viability.
