Parsing Palo Alto Config XML into PowerShell Objects
One of my customers is converting into an NSX-based network design. In order to facilitate this conversion, they need to understand the rules that exist on their Palo Alto firewall and then recreate those desired behaviors in the NSX microsegmentation. Their challenge was that their Palo Alto had a fairly complex ruleset, one that no one wanted to try and recreate by hand in NSX. I'm sure that you can see where this is going. Before we could create anything in NSX (via the ever-evolving PowerNSX module), we had to understand the configuration of the existing firewall. When I asked about exporting the configuration, the networking team told me that they had two options: JSON or XML. Not knowing what I was likely to get working, I asked for them both, then tried convertfrom-JSON and import-clixml on the provided files. Neither worked, so I had to do some digging. After banging my head into a wall for a while, one of my coworkers gave me...