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VM-Series Deployment Guide

Use vMotion to Move the VM-Series Firewall Between Hosts

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Use vMotion to Move the VM-Series Firewall Between Hosts

Starting with PAN-OS 9.1.6, to maintain traffic flow while using vMotion to move your VM-Series firewall on VMware ESXi between ESXi hosts, you must use the PAN-OS CLI to pause the internal heartbeat monitoring of the VM-Series firewall during vMotion. You can specify the amount of time, in minutes, that heartbeat monitoring is paused. Heartbeat monitoring can be paused for up to 60 minutes. When the pause interval expires or you deliberately end the pause interval, heartbeat monitoring resumes.

vMotion of the VM-Series firewall is supported on vSphere 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 if the ESXi hosts have homogeneous CPU configuration. PAN-OS 10.0, 9.1.6, or 9.0.11 and later is required to Use vMotion to Move the VM-Series Firewall Between Hosts installed on vSphere 6.5 or 6.7.

These commands are not required when using vMotion if you are running vSphere 7.0 or later.

Log in the VM-Series firewall CLI.
Set the heartbeat monitoring pause interval using the following command. The pause begins as soon as the command is executed. If vMotion is taking longer than expected, you can rerun this command to set a new, longer interval that starts when the command is executed again.
request system heartbeat-pause set interval <pause-time-in-minutes>
You can view the time remaining in pause interval using the following command.
request system heartbeat-pause show interval
(Optional) If you complete vMotion before the pause interval has elapsed, you can end the pause by setting the interval to zero (0).
request system heartbeat-pause set interval 0

Use VMware Tools on the VM-Series Firewall on ESXi and vCloud Air

Use the VM-Series CLI to Swap the Management Interface on ESXi