Activate VM-Series Model Licenses
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Activate VM-Series Model Licenses

Table of Contents

Activate VM-Series Model Licenses

Learn how to activate a VM-Series firewall with a fixed model license.
Where Can I Use This?What Do I Need?
  • VM-Series deployment
  • VM-Series 10.x or above
  • Panorama running PAN-OS 10.1.x or above versions
  • Customer Support Portal (CSP) account with one of the following user roles:
    • Super User, Standard User, Limited User, Threat Researcher, AutoFocus Trial Role, Group Super User, Group Standard User, Group Limited User, Group Threat Researcher, Authorized Support Center (ASC) User, and ASC Full Service User.
    • Superuser access to the VM-Series firewall
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 About the VM-Series Firewall.
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 don’t need to activate the license. You must Register the Usage-Based Model of the VM-Series Firewall for Public Clouds (no auth code) to activate your Premium Support entitlement.
For usage-based models of the VM-Series firewall in the AWS Marketplace, instances with short and long AWS instance IDs are supported.
Until you activate the license on the VM-Series firewall, the firewall does not have a serial number, the MAC addresses 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 don’t 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 with the serial number is used to validate your entitlement.
The VM-Series firewall License tab displays a standard VM-300 license file for all license models. To find your specific license model information, view the system info in the web interface, or the use the CLI to view system info.
After you license a VM-Series firewall, if you need to delete and redeploy the VM-Series firewall, make sure to Deactivate the License(s) on the firewall. Deactivating the license allows you to transfer the active licenses to a new instance of the VM-Series firewall without help from technical support.