The physical PA-5220 coughed one last time at 2:17 AM and went silent. The VM didn't flinch. Throughput: 3.2 Gbps steady. Session table: 1.7 million active flows. CPU on the ESXi host: 34%.
She logged into the support portal, navigated to , and there it was: pa-vm-esx-10.0.0.ova . download pa-vm-esx-10.0.0.ova
While waiting, she re-read the release notes for 10.0.0. No critical CVEs she didn’t already know. Known caveat: the initial dataplane might take 8 minutes to stabilize after first boot. She made a note. Patience would be a weapon tonight. The physical PA-5220 coughed one last time at
Maya stared at the blinking cursor on her terminal. It was 11:47 PM. The corporate VPN was holding steady, but the Palo Alto Networks support portal felt like it was loading in slow motion—each icon appearing one agonizing square at a time. Session table: 1
She then rerouted the core switch’s default gateway via OSPF to point to the new virtual MAC. Traffic flowed.