PA500 upgrade to PA460

[user109342]

Hi Team,

I need to upgrade my PA500 to new box PA460. PANOS software matrix says there is no way you can upgrade PA500 to any version newer than 8.1 nor you can downgrade PA460 to anything older than 10.1 which makes the process a bit tricky for me.

The question is what's the best way to migrate my configuration? Is the config different between 8.1 and 10.1 so that can I just copy past "set" command version of config into the new 10.1 CLI? 

Thanks!

[LAYER_8]

Download virtual box and request a VM eval from your account team. Or have them ship you a 220, 820, etc. running 8.1. Import the 500 configuration into the 800/vm, upgrade that box's software (review the release notes and known issues each time please!) to 10.1. Migrate the surrogate configuration from the 800/vm to the 400 series box. EZ

[MP18]

@user109342 

I've had success of importing older PAN-OS version configs with newer PAN-OS versions (multiple major versions ahead).

I think the best way to test is to take a config from a PA-500 and spin up a VM running a newer version (or the latest version) of PAN-OS and import it in there. If it works, then it will work on the hardware too.

Regards

[BPry]

@user109342,

As both other users have mentioned there's ways around this. You can either just spin-up a temporary VM and walk it through the upgrade procedure, or simply import the old configuration and correct any validation issues that you will run into. Generally speaking, older configurations will pull into newer operating systems fairly well as long as you aren't hilariously out of date.