topic PA-200 upgrade steps in General Topics

PA-200 upgrade steps

D.Fischer714105 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:21:26 GMT

Hi All,

New to PA firewalls and have an old EOL PA-200 running PanOS5.0.6

I would like to upgrade to 8.1.26 but every upgrade attempt fails from the GUI or CLI

I downloaded PanOS 6.0.0 and 6.0.15 but it also fails requiring content version 401 or higher <-- no idea what that means

What am I missing at this point? Is there a way to simply install the 8.1.0 base OS directly via tftp?

Thanks
DF

Re: PA-200 upgrade steps

Raido_Rattameister — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:11:23 GMT

Skipping version during upgrade is not available before 11.0.

https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/11-0/pan-os-new-features/management-features/skip-software-version-upgrade

By "content version 401 or higher" it means dynamic update under "Device > Dynamic Updates".

As PA-200 is EOL then it is not available any more.

Best you can do is to use it as-is as a regular layer 4 router/firewall. Nothing else.

Re: PA-200 upgrade steps

BPry — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 05:10:32 GMT

@D.Fischer714105,

As @Raido_Rattameister already mentioned this PA-200 isn't going to be very useful. If you already have a relationship with Palo-Alto, talking to your account manager to see if you can get a lab unit would be the next logical step. Depending on the size of your organizations account or how recently you started purchasing hardware this may be something provided without any cost to yourself for the first year. If that isn't the case, at the very least a lab PA-440 is a relatively inexpensive commitment to get something you can test new things out on.

If you're just looking to get your hands dirty with PAN-OS, you could also go the virtual route. Since you can use PAYG in the public cloud this can end up being the cheapest option depending on how often you'll be using it. I'm still very much in the belief that physical hardware is easier to lab with for the majority of people since it doesn't demand spinning up additional VMs just to get traffic to show up on the device.