Panorama VM to VM migration while going from Legacy to Panorama Mode

[sellington]

Hello all,

currently we use a Panorama VM running PanOS 9.0.5 in Legacy mode (did not even know that was possible) to manage a couple of HA pairs of firewalls.

Unfortunately we are unable to edit the resources of that VM in our Hypervisor, likely due to how it was originally provisioned, so we cannot go the route of adding the needed resources for panorama mode and upgrading our existing VM. 

We have spun up a completely fresh new Panorama VM using PanOS 9.1.2 in Panorama mode that we would like to migrate to and was looking for some guidance on how we could accomplish this. Are we able to export the config snapshot from the existing panorama, import that config into the new panorama and upgrade to Panorama mode at the same time? 

If the above is possible, after we transfer the license from the current production Panorama VM to our new Panorama VM will we still be able to view historic logs on the old VM sans license?

I have a ticket in with PA support for guidance, but was looking for the communities thoughts as well. 

Thanks,

[Braden_Tolman]

When you're migrating a NGFW config from one PAN-OS version to another, you'll typically need to use the Expedition Migration tool to convert it to the new OS version. I haven't used the tool myself, so don't know about if it's the same situation with Panorama.

Generally, any config migration will go a hundred times smoother if you are at the very least on the same Feature Release version (9.0 and 9.1 are different feature releases).