PA-VM 50 Trial Not Working on vSphere 8

[JBregman2]

We are longtime Sonicwall users looking to potentially upgrade to PAN. We are starting with the PA-50 trial virtual firewalls so we can test them in our staging environment. We want to see how they perform, how easy they are to configure, and high availability (either a/a or a/p) is a must. We are running on the latest build of vSphere 8 and ESXI.

We download the zip file of 10.2.5 for ESX and unzip it according to the Mac OS guide to doing this on the CLI. The OVA expands and we deploy it on our vSphere instance which has tons of capacity, bandwidth (it's in a DC) and NVME storage / vSAN.

Sadly, after all this we get a blinking prompt "PA-HDF login: _". Admin/admin does not work. Waiting does not work. Hitting enter in hopes it will show a different prompt as per other articles does not work. Support did not seem to know anything about what could be going on. It's not exactly the start we wanted. Say what you will about SW but their VM firewalls boot up.

https://share.zight.com/2Nu9JQrn

https://share.zight.com/z8uBA9XZ

https://share.zight.com/04uRGzKR 

We have tired 4x times on 2 different vSphere instances. We're stuck at the starting line. Some of us want to concentrate on Checkpoint and are losing faith in PA because of this false start. I'm willing to believe but want to see what the community thinks?

[JayGolf]

Hi @JBregman2 ,

When a Palo Alto FW boots and initializes you'll see three different types of login prompts:
 

1. PA-HDF login:
2. VM-Series login:
3. PA-VM:

When the prompt displayed is #3, then the device is ready to accept the default username/password to allow login.

When you see the PA-VM are you able to enter the default credentials? 

[JBregman2]

Hi - thanks for the reply. Yes I've read the KB that describes the bootup behavior. However, after trying multiple VMs spawned from different OVAs on two separate vSphere 8 instances we have never seen the PA VM boot up past the PA-HDF screen, even after days. Any ideas?