Palo Alto VM does not have serial number

Question

Hello everyone, I would to ask for help with licensing my PA VM, particularly - getting device serial number, which is "unknown" for some reason

Answer 1

Hi Pavlo Khazov,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

Based on our understanding of your issue, we recommend that you refer to the following steps to retrieve the Serial Number:

• The serial number on the support portal is tied to the CPUID and the UUID values on the firewalls. So, if they got changed, the support portal will no longer be able to recognize the firewall, which will cause the serial number to become “unknown”. No licenses will appear under GUI: Device > Licenses
• When the firewall starts without a serial number, it means that the VM has no capacity license installed.
• After changing the instance type of the PA-VM in the public cloud, It will show serial no. "unknown".

1. CLI: Run the command show system info | match serial
2. GUI: Check the "General Information" on the Dashboard: 

Follow the Instructions to get the serial no. fetched.

1. Open a Support Case.
2. The support team will edit CPUID and UUID on the backend server to match the new values on the PA-VM instance.
3. Once the edit is completed and the CPUID/UUID matches the firewall, then, retrieve the licenses on the firewall using either the CLI or GUI, as explained below:
   • GUI: Navigate to GUI:Device > Licenses > License Management and click on "Retrieve license keys from license server".
   • CLI: Run the command request license fetch
4. Once the firewall fetches the licenses, it will restart all the services automatically to match the system specifications of the applied capacity licenses (i.e. VM-100, VM-300, VM-500, ...etc.).

For more Information look into below steps to follow:

• Access the web interface of the firewall. Navigate to Device > Licenses and click Activate Feature using Auth Code.
• Click Download Authorization File to download an authorizationfile.txt file on the client machine.
• Copy the above file to a computer that has access to the internet and log into the support portal. Click My VM-Series Auth-Codes and select the applicable auth-code from the list.
• Then click Register VM.
• On the Register VM popup window select the authorization file. This will complete the registration process, and the serial number of the VM-Series firewall will be attached to the record on the support site.
• Navigate to the My Devices tab and search for the VM-Series device just registered and click the PA-VM link. This will download the VM-Series license key for the client machine.
• Copy the license key to the machine that can access the web interface of the VM-Series firewall and navigate to Device > License tab.

Click Manually Upload License and enter the license key. The license will be activated on the device and the device will reboot.

• Log into the device and confirm that the dashboard displays a valid serial number. If it is unknown, it means the device was not licensed.
• On the Device > Licenses tab, verify that the PA-VM license was added to the device.

If you found it helpful, could you kindly click the “Accept Answer and upvote” on the post.

If you have any further queries, please let us know we are glad to help you.