topic Discussion on the Firewall OS Upgrade Sequence When Sending OS Upgrade Commands from Panorama to HA-Configured Firewalls in Panorama Discussions

Discussion on the Firewall OS Upgrade Sequence When Sending OS Upgrade Commands from Panorama to HA-Configured Firewalls

C.Seokgun — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 09:03:53 GMT

Hello, everyone. In this image, if we perform "install and reboot" with Group HA Peers enabled, what steps do the firewalls go through during the OS upgrade process?

Re: Discussion on the Firewall OS Upgrade Sequence When Sending OS Upgrade Commands from Panorama to HA-Configured Firewalls

PavelK — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:21:31 GMT

Hello @C.Seokgun

thanks for post!

If you want to use Panorama to upgrade Firewall HA pair from Panorama you should select HA Upgrade Orchestration check box. This is a new feature introduce in PAN-OS 12.1.2: High Availability Firewall Pair Upgrade Orchestration from Panorama. With this feature enabled Panorama performs upgrade in below order:

Upgrades the passive (or active-secondary) peer first.
Automatically reboots the passive peer.
After the first passive peer is back online and the HA status is synchronized, the system initiates HA failover and upgrades the other peer.

Prior to this feature there was no native automated way to upgrade HA pair. The failover had to be done manually.

Kind Regards

Pavel

Re: Discussion on the Firewall OS Upgrade Sequence When Sending OS Upgrade Commands from Panorama to HA-Configured Firewalls

Raido_Rattameister — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:25:56 GMT

When upgrading manually I never suspend firewalls as I don't like risk of theoretical failure of other firewall and no-one to take over (as one of firewalls is suspended).

Also I don't like that first thing orchestrated upgrade does is to suspend firewall (even before PANOS is copied over) leaving extended period of one firewall being suspended.

What I have not tested yet is if orchestrated upgrade sends whole command list (suspend > upgrade > reboot) to firewall at once or step by step during the process (if upgrade completes and firewall reboots even if connectivity to Panorama is lost or not).

Person who wrote that "firewalls must be suspended" and "primary must be done first" is very wrong in my opinion. In my opinion safest is to upgrade and reboot passive. Then upgrade and reboot active without suspending neither during the process.

"For active/passive firewalls, you must suspend (fail over) and upgrade the active (primary) peer first. After you upgrade the primary peer, you must unsuspend the primary peer to return it to a functional state (passive). "

https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/11-1/pan-os-upgrade/upgrade-pan-os/upgrade-the-firewall-pan-os/upgrade-an-ha-firewall-pair