What is the best way to import a device state to an old device

[vsingh]

Recently we faced an issue with one of the firewalls so we thought to replace with a spare one. we took the device state backup and imported it into the Spared firewall. It was running the same OS and same hardware. But It was NOT factory reset, it has the configuration and we didn't do it factor reset and uploaded the device state backup. but then we saw multiple commit errors. I don't understand why? Because after importing a new device state it should overwrite all the config on the spared device but it is throwing commit error related to its existing config.

Just wanted to understand why that happened? Does the device state not overwrite after uploading a new device state to the spared firewall or it must be factory reset before uploading any device state? Please provide your expert views.

[MickBall]

i was referring to the revert option in the top RH corner under config. it was only to use if the commit had failed. (to put the FW back to QA) and start again..

I used the snapshot option from prod to QA, have you tried that....

[vsingh]

No, I didn't try the snapshot option because the snapshot doesn't have a panorama pushed policy, it does have only running-config of the firewall. I use device state as it contains panorama pushes policy also. 

[vsingh]

Is there any way to get Palo alto configuration which includes firewall configuration directly done from the device and object and policy rules pushed from the panorama?

Or any way to get a configuration for e.g. policy and object for a particular device-group from Panorama?

[MickBall]

you could take a snapshot of prod firewall and import to QA, then join QA to panorama and add to same device group to push policies out.

or

remove prd firewall from panorama and keep policies.  do not commit but just save the configuration to file.  then revert the change and export the file for QA.