I just purchased a MAG4610 and was using the SA DTE VM for testing. When I was downloading the VM with the Juniper SE, he asked if I was going to use the Secure Meeting feature. He said that if I intended to use that heavily than I should stick with the recommended 7.4 release. He didn't specify any further details as to why, but he went on to say if I wasn't going to use or rely on Secure Meeting (or just experiment with it) than he suggested going to 8.0.
8.0 Introduced a major new features such as MDM Integration with AirWatch and MobileIron, so if this is something you want, then you have to use 8.0. licensed and you don't actually even ned to apply your concurrent user license to the device. If you apply it, it's basically ignored since the device will still stay max licensed, although you are still required by the EULA to purchase the correct number of concurrent user licenses. T
his new license model can be useful in an unexpected situation of you running out of licenses. On 7.4, this would mean users can't connect until you can purchase and activate new licenses. But on 8.0, if you exceed your purchased limit, the unit doesn't care. Again, you still need to buy those additional licenses, but you're not going stuck with users who can't connect if you end up in this situation and are running 8.0.
My MAG4610 had a base SA image of 7.4R1. Per release notes on 8.0R1, the recommendation is for devices that are pre-7.4R1 to first upgrade to 7.1R16 or newer and then to upgrade to 8.0R1.
Assuming your device has something older than 7.1R16 currently you can go from currently version -> 7.1R16 -> 8.0R2. This is the upgrade path I took. However, before I read the upgrade path, I did an upgrade straight from 7.1R1 -> 8.0R2 and it worked without issue, so you could probably go straight through if you wanted given it's a new device with no pre-existing configuration to potentially get changed.
You could also go from 7.1R1 -> 7.4R9 if you prefer to stay on the JTAC recommended release.
I did about 30 days of testing with the SA DTE VM running 8.0R1 and didn't run into any issues for how I am using the device, which is a mix of Windows and Mac client, URL Rewriting, Passthrough Proxy, WSAM, JSAM, and Pulse. I did not do any testing with Host Checker/Cache Cleaner however, but nothing I've read in release notes leads me to believe there would be any issues.
