topic Re: Impact of installing licenses on firewall in production in General Topics

Impact of installing licenses on firewall in production

josggf — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 16:06:11 GMT

Hi
As the subject suggests, I have 3020 for which license have to be installed after being in production. What's the impact on traffic in such a case? I have noticed the VM firewall takes a restart so...

Re: Impact of installing licenses on firewall in production

gwesson — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 18:07:39 GMT

Good news! You won't need to restart the firewall to apply new licenses:

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/documentation/81/pan-os/pan-os/getting-started/activate-licenses-and-subscriptions

The only action needed is a commit, but even that is only required for a Wildfire license if you want to forward advanced file types.

Re: Impact of installing licenses on firewall in production

josggf — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 18:15:06 GMT

awesome

although the link you shared is for 8.1 and i am on 7.1.5

secondly it doesnt mention impact or interrruption anywhere

Re: Impact of installing licenses on firewall in production

gwesson — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 18:26:59 GMT

The instructions are the same on 7.1. Most of the documentation will be the same, you can just change the URI to reflect the version you're on:

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/documentation/71/pan-os/pan-os/getting-started/activate-licenses-and-subscriptions

Nothing is mentioned about impact or interruption because it doesn't interrupt anything. It's not really feasible to list all the things that installing a license does *not* do.

You mentioned you're running 7.1.5 - that version was released almost 2 years ago (October 3, 2016), and has several significant and critical vulnerabilities. I'd highly encourage you to upgrade to 7.1.18 or 7.1.19.

If you genuinely are concerned about impact, you're putting your infrastructure at risk by using that old of a code revision unless you've taken steps to mitigate all of the issues.

https://securityadvisories.paloaltonetworks.com/