Sophos XG/SG 210 rev 3

The same 1U box shipped under two names, and each name came with its own retirement date. Badged SG, it ran Sophos’s older UTM 9 software; badged XG, the newer Sophos Firewall OS. Sophos then wound the two lines down on separate schedules even though the iron underneath is identical: XG hardware went end-of-life on 31 March 2025, while the SG track outlived it by fifteen months and reached end of support on 30 June 2026 — three days before I started this page. A firewall tends to become interesting to this lab at about the point its vendor stops caring about it, so the timing is fitting.

The dual branding is not my inference. Sophos’s own operating instructions PDF is titled for the XG 210 and XG 230, but the port-and-connector diagram inside it is labelled “SG 210 Rev. 3, SG 230 Rev. 2” — one manual, one hardware revision, documented under both product lines, with a footnote admitting the cover photo is actually the 230. What separates an SG unit from an XG unit is the software it was licensed to run and the sticker on the front, not the board. The four boxes here bear that out: set side by side, the SG pair and the XG pair look identical.

Behind the fixed ports — six copper gigabit, two of them wired as bypass pairs, plus two SFP cages — sits a single FleXi Port bay, Sophos’s swappable expansion slot. The brochure lists a spread of modules for it: more copper, more SFP, 10-gigabit SFP+, 40-gigabit QSFP+, and a few Power-over-Ethernet and LAN-bypass variants, with the 40-gigabit and PoE options reserved for this Rev. 3 generation. Rev. 3 is itself a later refresh of the 210 name, not the first thing to wear it. An earlier SG 210 in the 2014 brochure had six copper ports and nothing else, a VGA socket where this one has HDMI, and a shorter chassis. The rev 3 label on the back is what marks the boundary; the exact date Sophos introduced it I could not find.

The two lifecycle tracks are worth setting down plainly, because they are easy to conflate. On the XG side Sophos names the XGS 2100 as the successor and set the dates end-of-sale 31 March 2022, last licence renewal 31 March 2024, end-of-life 31 March 2025 — after which, in Sophos’s own words, the hardware is end-of-life “irrespective of how they are deployed and licensed.” The SG/UTM track kept its own calendar: end-of-sale 30 June 2023, final renewal deadline 31 December 2025, end of support 30 June 2026. Which of the two governs a given unit depends on how that unit was badged and licensed, which is a fact about the sticker, not something I will read off a running configuration.

The units here come down on both sides: four boxes, two badged SG 210 and two badged XG 210, all rev 3, all secondhand off eBay — the XG pair listed as “XG 210 v3” and “XG 210 Rev. 3.” So both retirement clocks above govern machines in this rack: the XG pair’s ran out on 31 March 2025, the SG pair’s on 30 June 2026. None of them run either vendor OS anymore; all four run plain Linux and work as firewalls, which is what the hardware was built for even if the software is not what Sophos had in mind.

In this lab these are x86-64 machines that happen to be shaped like firewalls. Under the branding is an ordinary PC — an Intel Celeron, DDR4, an on-board SSD — in a quiet rackmount case with an unusual number of network ports and a small front-panel LCD. That is the appeal: cheap, well-built x86-64 hardware that the vendor has finished with. Both end-of-sale dates are years past, so anything on the market now is leftover or refurbished channel stock rather than new production; I have not pinned a current secondhand price, so I will not quote one.

The revision is settled by looking at the front: on the rev 3 chassis the LCD sits on the left, where earlier revisions put it on the right, and all four boxes here have it on the left. What remains open is whether any FleXi bay is populated or blank. What it is like to live with the front-panel LCD and its four membrane buttons, and a photo of the front panel, are still to be documented.

One preservation note. The single document that carries the processor, memory, and storage figures — the 2017 technical-specifications sheet — no longer has a copy on sophos.com that I could find; the only live copy is a reseller’s own upload, and it is not yet in the Wayback Machine. The 2022 XG brochure has likewise gone from sophos.com, returning a 404, and survives here only through an archived snapshot. Both are held in the research manifest against the day the mirrors go too.

Sources: Sophos’s own operating instructions and quick-start PDFs for the XG/SG 210 Rev. 3; the 2017 SG/XG technical-specifications sheet and the 2022 XG Series brochure, cross-checked against each other; and two Sophos Partner News posts for the end-of-life dates, corroborated by Avanet’s partner-maintained lifecycle calendar. The full specifications, with a note on the figures that rest on a single sheet, are on the specifications page.