topic How to upgrade to PAN-OS 12.1 on PA-3400 (not shown in GUI) in General Topics

How to upgrade to PAN-OS 12.1 on PA-3400 (not shown in GUI)

cpcpcptest176 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:45:16 GMT

Hello Experts,

We are currently setting up a PA-3400 series firewall and would like to upgrade PAN-OS to version 12.1.

Current version: PAN-OS 11.1.13

We understand that PAN-OS 11.1 may be more stable, but since it is approaching EOS within about a year, we would prefer to deploy 12.1.

However, when we check under Device > Software in the GUI, PAN-OS 12.1 is not displayed.
On the other hand, when we check via CLI, we can see that PAN-OS 12.1 is available.

In this situation, is it expected that upgrading to PAN-OS 12.1 must be done via CLI or manual upload instead of the GUI?

We could not find clear information about this behavior in the official documentation.
If anyone has experienced the same issue or has any insights, we would appreciate your advice.

Thank you.

Re: How to upgrade to PAN-OS 12.1 on PA-3400 (not shown in GUI)

kiwi — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:28:16 GMT

Hi @cpcpcptest176 ,

Check in the GUI if you have checked "Preferred Releases" at the bottom of the page.

When this is checked the GUI will only display preferred releases. In order to see other releases you'll need to uncheck this.

Hope this helps,

Re: How to upgrade to PAN-OS 12.1 on PA-3400 (not shown in GUI)

Brandon_Wertz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:25:53 GMT

@cpcpcptest176 -- FYI, we've got a 3410 (And 5540) running 12.1.5 and we've already had it crash with a memory leak. This is the current TAC investigation. As of yet we've not been provided a bug-id/Fix. So I definetly wouldn't deploy 12.1.X to any production firewall. That said once there's a TAC preferred version of 12.1, this code base is something customers would see benefit in running:

"While investigating the TSF logs during the issue time, we noticed that the firewall's total available memory was less because of which multiple processes experienced OOM and that caused the firewall's unexpected reboot.

During this time, the configd process was occupying high memory and it looks like the memory leak in configd process."