topic PA 5540 Deployment in General Topics

PA 5540 Deployment

Brandon_Wertz — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:31:14 GMT

I recently purchased a 5540 pair and plan on deploying them in the next few months swapping out a 5250 pair. I'm curious if anyone has worked with the 5500s yet, or even PANOS 12.1?

Any comments or feedback you might have based on what you've seen so far.

Re: PA 5540 Deployment

Brandon_Wertz — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:38:44 GMT

One thing that we already provided feedback to the account team the documentation isn't exactly obvious. When we tried getting the 5540s up, we couldn't get management online. Apparently there are "logging" interfaces and "management" interfaces. We had initially used the SFP ports on the left of slot 7, but that didn't get management to come up. When we moved the SFP to the right bank of ports the management interfaces came up on the 2 boxes.

So there's a little "ism" that isn't directly obvious for anyone trying to get these new hardware types online.

Re: PA 5540 Deployment

CosminM — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:54:48 GMT

Hello @Brandon_Wertz

I haven't work yet with PA-5500 series but since you have a pair and you think to replace a PA-5250 pair, I advice to look carefully on High Availability and Clustering part. The PA-5500 series have only HSCI interface and according with official documentation (datasheet) HA active-passive is not supported yet.

In PAN-OS 12.1 for PA-5500 series there is a new feature called NGFW Clustering.

Re: PA 5540 Deployment

Brandon_Wertz — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:57:32 GMT

@CosminM -- Yeah I noticed that. Thanks for the heads up. I hear there might be some good news on that front.

Re: PA 5540 Deployment

Brandon_Wertz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:47:18 GMT

Another update on the new 5540s. It looks like the firewalls do not log locally by default. I wasn't seeing any logs being logged directly on the device. After disabling "high speed log forwarding" I was finally able to see logs locally on the firewall. The setting is found here:

Device --> Setup --> Management --> Logging and Reporting Settings