VM-500 will it run with 6xCPU?

[aleksandar.astardzhiev]

Hi All,

We currently have one customer with two clusters running VM-300, but facing  dataplane CPU utilization. Support team has upgraded the VMs to 6xCPU (without knowing that VM-300 only support up to 4).

Right now VMs are with 6 CPUs allocated and we are planning to upgrade the vm capacity to VM-500. But I was wondering how the current CPUs will re-assigned? Any document I have found so far is only mentioning support for 4 and 8 CPUs and how they will be distributed between management and dataplan...

I am wondering what will happen?

- Will the VMs  be able to boot and reach operational state?

- Or just the CPU distribution will still be 4 management and 2 dataplane?

I am pretty sure that we eventually will need to upgrade to 8 CPUs, but I want to know if we can leave the firewall running with VM-500 and 6 CPUs assigned (while planning next maintenance to increase the cpus) or we must do both (upgrade the license and increase the CPUs to 8 per VM).

Thank you in advance!

[reaper]

you'll need to upgrade to 8 CPU as the vm500 won't support 6 (and so only use 4)

[aleksandar.astardzhiev]

Thank you for the prompt feedback @reaper!

My concern is that we have approved plan to upgrade the VM capacity only - which shouldn't require reboot. While CPU upgrade requires VM shutdown.

So I am wondering if we can leave the CPU upgrade for another day and leave the firewall running with VM-500 and 6 CPUs - will the firewall still function properly?

We will definately upgrade to 8 CPU, because we need to assign additional CPUs to the dataplane (as the current 2 are overloaded). But cpu upgrade would probably be in different day, if possible.

[reaper · Accepted solution]

IMHO the VM500 would function but only on 4 cores 

[lukeakrigg]

Hi,

We are performing the same upgrade, just wonder how this went, did the CPU's auto allocate after assigning more and booting post VM-500 license ?  We will upgrade to 8vCPU and 16GB of ram.  From 4vCPU and 6.5GB ram.

[ecarvajal]

https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/vm-series/10-1/vm-series-deployment/license-the-vm-series-firewall...