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.
Within an hour, Maya imported a partial config from the failing physical firewall: security policies, NAT rules, SSL decryption profiles. No wildcard objects—10.0.0 handled them better than 9.x, but still had character limits. download pa-vm-esx-10.0.0.ova
The console showed the familiar boot sequence: BIOS, GRUB, then the PanOS kernel. A green [ OK ] line appeared for each service: mgmtsrvr , dataplane , pan_task . Then the prompt: login: While waiting, she re-read the release notes for 10
She clicked download. The progress bar inched forward. 2%. 7%. 12%. She made a note
Maya closed her laptop at 2:45 AM. Outside her window, the city hummed. The .ova file sat archived in her secure backups folder, renamed with today’s date: 2024-03-02_pa-vm-esx-10.0.0.ova .
Default creds: admin / admin . First rule of firewall deployment: change immediately.
At 12:03 AM, the download finished. She verified the SHA-256 checksum against the portal’s hash. Match. Good. No corruption. No tampering.
