Looking to Learn Palo Alto

[daveram]

Looking for advice on cheapest way to learn Palo Alto? I am a consultant and dont have any Palo Alto licenses. Is a VM lab license affordable, is there trials or is ebay the best option?

Thanks in advance!

[TranceforLife]

Hello,

I do prefer VM option. Reasons because it is very flexible, you don't need to have any  physical gear, you don't have to do any cabling if your want to modify your topology etc. Also, it is free. If you don't  have licenses for PA it is fine, for the lab environment, you don't need to have all these. What I have noticed that only PA-VM 5.0.6 is able to show traffic logs in the monitoring tab without the licenses, all other VMs don't. So go for it, install one ( l was using WMWare Workstation as a hypervisor) and do tests etc. You may also kindly ask sales support team in Palo, they might give you trial licenses. Good video training is CBT Nuggets with Keith. Try them  really good one.

Below my virtual lab just for example:

Happy studying,

Myky

[pulukas]

Personally, I like to have hardware in my lab, but the VM does have pretty much all you need to experiment.

Licensing can be an issue in the lab.  You have to have a business address to assciate a license purchase.  For some reason PA won't allow resellers to sell with a residential address even to registered small businesses. 

You should also check out the learning resources and free online courses posted on this PA site.

http://paloaltonetworks.csod.com/

[ASCIT]

You've mentioned that the VM option is free. Where can the VM image be downloaded from?

[TranceforLife]

Hello,

You do need to have a support account with PA. If not try to google for .ova file

Cheers,

Myky

[ASCIT]

I've got a support account with hardware assets assigned. Do I need to purchase VM-series devices?

[TranceforLife]

Hi,

Try to go to the Software updates section under your support account and search for VM base images. You need to install VM based image first. 

[ASCIT]

PAN-OS for VM-Series does not appear under software updates for my account. I believe this is due to not having purchased a VM-Series firewall. It’s a shame that after significant investment in hardware devices, a VM device is not available for educational purposes.

[TranceforLife]

Hi,

If you got support account, you can request from  Palo to give you access for the training purpose. Did you try to get in touch with sales department or your account manager?

Thx