To activate the license on your VM-Series firewall, you must have deployed the VM-Series firewall and completed initial configuration. To deploy the firewall, see VM-Series Deployments.

Use the instructions in this section for all the BYOL models including AWS, Azure, and Google Public Cloud. For usage-based licensing in public clouds, you do not need to activate the license. You must Register the Usage-Based Model of the VM-Series Firewall for Public Clouds (no auth code) in order to activate your premium support entitlement.

Until you activate the license on the VM-Series firewall, the firewall does not have a serial number, the MAC address of the dataplane interfaces are not unique, and only a minimal number of sessions are supported. Because the MAC addresses are not unique until the firewall is licensed, to prevent issues caused by overlapping MAC addresses, make sure that you do not have multiple, unlicensed VM-Series firewalls.

When you activate the license, the licensing server uses the UUID and the CPU ID of the virtual machine to generate a unique serial number for the VM-Series firewall. The capacity auth code in conjunction with the serial number is used to validate your entitlement.