Panorama 8.1 VM on ESXi in Legacy Mode

[stewartmichie]

Hi All

I need to deploy Panorama 8.1 on ESXi . Due to some capacity (mostly disk and CPU) limitations on the customer infrastructure this needs to run this in Legacy mode with 4CPU/4GB RAM.  There will be 10 PA220 firewalls, but all very quiet and don't' expect massive log volumes.  I would like ~200GB available for log storage. 

I'm getting caught in the deployment guide step where it specifies to use a 52GB HDD for Legacy mode.  You can't shrink the 81GB VMDK within the OVA file. Also,  as Legacy mode can only log to a single disk, what is the best way to get 200GB of storage available for logging? 

Using the Panorama 8.1 OVA image - is anyone able to give me a rough breakdown of how to achieve this?  

[TommieVanHove]

was looking up running panorama in legacy mode for 8.1 recently. as I have a fairly similar but not completely identical issue. 
however mine is an upgrade from 7.1 so I don't ned to deploy from the ova. 

however as I came to understand it. 

if you configure the vm with an 81gb disk and no additional 2tb disk for the initial setup. the panorama will be forced in legacy mode. 

using 11gb of the 81gb disk. 

after initial config you can I believe add a disk( say your 200gb disk) and follow the guide to add disks to vm and enable them for logging. 

adding this disk will not magically convert the appliance to panorama mode as I believe this has to be initiated manually from cli. (so you should stay in legacy mode)

so I would try this. however I'm not sure if this works when starting from the OVA image.

However I would think so as running in legacy mode is currently the only way to not being forced to use 2tb as minimum log.

(which was the issue for my upgrade as our customer was not willing/able to jump from a 34GB logdisk to 2TB)

panorama in legacy mode indeed only support logging to 1 disk: 

if the vm has 1 disk it uses 11gb on the system disk

if you configure an additional disk for the vm and allow logging to that said disk it will forego using the 11gb on the system disk and just log all to the extra dedicated disk( ranging from 11gb to 8tb)