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:
- Migrating from an evaluation license to a production license.
- 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.Make sure that you are using the same account that you used to register the initial license.
- From the menu on the left, select .
- Copy the API key.
- 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 Customer Support portal. 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.
