Virtual systems are supported on PA-3200 Series, PA-5200 Series, and PA-7000 Series firewalls. Each firewall series supports a base number of virtual systems; the number varies by platform. A Virtual Systems license is required to support multiple virtual systems on PA-3200 Series firewalls, and to create more than the base number of virtual systems supported on a platform.

For license information, see Subscriptions. For the base and maximum number of virtual systems supported, see Compare Firewalls tool.

Multiple virtual systems are not supported on the PA-220, PA-800 Series, or VM-Series firewalls.

You can limit the resource allocations for sessions, rules and VPN tunnels allowed for a virtual system, and thereby control firewall resources. Each resource setting displays the valid range of values, which varies per firewall model. The default setting is 0, which means the limit for the virtual system is the limit for the firewall model. However, the limit for a specific setting isn’t replicated for each virtual system. For example, if a firewall has four virtual systems, each virtual system can’t have the total number of Decryption Rules allowed per firewall. After the total number of Decryption Rules for all of the virtual systems reaches the firewall limit, you cannot add more.