Palo Alto 11.0.1 VM on EVE-NG with initial configuration

Start by obtaining either the ESXi VM image or KVM image. If you can only get the ESXi OVA follow the steps in a previous post here, to extract and convert the VMDK image into qcow2 format. It is worth noting that the VMDK converted image is significantly larger than the KVM image directly from Palo Alto: 8.5Gb vs 4.9Gb .

Once the image becomes available in the EVE-NG GUI, before you launch it make sure you increase the availble RAM to 5632MB otherwise once the VM has booted it will produce a steady stream of errors and refuse to let you login.

Palo Alto knowledgebase documentation recommends 5.5Gb for a VM-50 series model.

From within the EVE-NG GUI before you start the Node, right-click ‘Edit’ to adjust the amount of RAM and also set the console type to ‘telnet’.

Next connect the Palo Alto Node to a Network object in the EVE-NG GUI. I have configured the EVE-NG VM with a single network adapter as type ‘Host-only’, this means I can only reach this subnet whilst on the host itself. By setting the network object to type ‘Cloud0’ it bridges the pnet0 adapter to eth0 VM network interface.

Next connec the Palo Alto ‘mgmt’ interface to the Cloud0 network object, in doing so connecting to the host-only subnet on the vmware Workstation host.

set deviceconfig system ip-address 192.168.172.64 netmask 255.255.255.0
set deviceconfig system type static
set deviceconfig setting advance-routing yes

Once you have committed the configuration use of the Advanced Routing engine requires that the device is restarted.

request restart system

Once the Palo Alto node comes back online you can then connect to the WebGUI via the static IP address configured earlier.