Upgrade the VM-Series Model
The licensing process for the VM-Series firewall
uses the UUID and the CPU ID to generate a unique serial number
for each VM-Series firewall. Hence, when you generate a license, the
license is mapped to a specific instance of the VM-Series firewall
and cannot be modified.
Use the instructions in this section
if you are upgrading the model to allow for increased capacity.
For example you want to upgrade from the VM-100 to the VM-300 model.
A
capacity upgrade restarts some critical processes on the firewall.
An HA configuration is recommended to minimize service disruption;
to upgrade the capacity on a HA pair, see Upgrade
the VM-Series Model in an HA Pair.
- Allocate additional hardware resources to your VM-Series firewall.Before initiating the capacity upgrade, you must verify that enough hardware resources are available to the VM-Series firewall to support the new capacity. The process for assigning additional hardware resources differs on each hypervisor.To check the hardware requirements for your new VM-Series model, see VM-Series Models.Although the capacity upgrade does not require a reboot of the VM-Series firewall, you need to power down the virtual machine to change the hardware allocation.
- Retrieve the license deactivation API key from the Customer Support Portal.
- Log in to the Customer Support Portal.
- From the Go To drop-down, selectLicense API.
- Copy the API key.
Make sure that you are using the same account that you used to register the initial license. - On the firewall, use the CLI to install the API key copied in the previous step.request license api-key set key<key>
- Enable the firewall toVerify Update Server identityon .
- Commityour changes. Ensure that you have a locally-configured user on the firewall. Panorama pushed users might not be available after the deactivation if the configuration exceeds the non-licensed PA-VM objects limit.
- Upgrade the capacity.Select and then activate your licenses and subscriptions in one of the following ways:
- Retrieve license keys from license server—Use this option if you activated your license on the Customer Support portal.
- Manually upload license key—Use this option if your firewall does not have connectivity to the Palo Alto Networks Customer Support web site. In this case, you must download a license key file from the support site on an Internet connected computer and then upload to the firewall.
- Use an authorization code—Use this option to upgrade the VM-Series capacity using an authorization code for licenses that have not been previously activated on the support portal. When prompted, enter theAuthorization Codeand then clickOK.
- Verify that your firewall is licensed successfully.On the page, verify that the license was successfully activated.
