VM-Series firewalls add support for link aggregation for ESXi and KVM environments. This feature supports multiple connections that combine into a single logical bonding device with a unique name that is associated with a network device (either physical or virtual) as secondary devices. The bonded device possesses a unique MAC address that is shared among all secondary devices.

Important things to consider:

To configure link aggregation, enable PAN-OS to change VM MAC addresses. To do this, configure MAC address changes: Accept.

Learn how to configure link aggregation support on the VM-Series for ESXi and KVM.

CN-Series Hyperscale Security Fabric (HSF) introduces dynamic routing through BGP and BGP over BFD protocols. Using Dynamic routing, you can attain stable, high-performing, and highly available layer 3 routing through profile-based filtering lists and conditional route maps, which can be used across logical routers. These profiles provide finer granularity to filter routes for each dynamic routing protocol and improve route redistribution across multiple protocols.

BGP looks for the available paths that data could travel and picks the best route, based on IP prefixes that are available within autonomous systems. The Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) provides fast forwarding path failure detection times for BGP routing protocols between CN-GW pods and the external router.

Strata Logging Service enables AI-based innovations for cybersecurity with the industry’s only approach to normalizing and stitching together your enterprise’s data. For more information, see About Strata Logging Service and Deploy Strata Logging Service with Panorama. Strata Logging Service can now collect log data from CN-Series next-generation firewall. When you purchase a Strata Logging Service license, all firewalls registered to your support account receive a Strata Logging Service. You will also receive a magic link that you will need to use to activate your Strata Logging Service instance.

To get started with CN-Series firewall Strata Logging Service, you must ensure that you Install the Kubernetes Plugin and Set up Panorama for your CN-Series Firewall. You must provide the device certificate to the CN-MGMT pod for Strata Logging Service connectivity. It is important to register your CN-MGMT pod with a CSP account to ensure that CN-MGMT pod is reflected in your Strata Logging Service instance. Add the valid PIN-ID and PIN-value to pan-cn-mgmt-secret.yaml file to successfully install the device certificate. The CN-Series firewall requires a device certificate that authorizes secure access to Strata Logging Service. For more information see Install a Device Certificate on the CN-Series Firewall.

After you deploy your CN-Series firewall, verify that your CN-MGMT pod is visible on your CSP account, under Registered Devices. For more information see, Register the Firewall. You must ensure that you configure your CN-Series firewall with Panorama and Create a CN-Series Deployment Profile on your CSP account and use the auth code to push licenses from Panorama to your CN-Series firewall.

For Palo Alto Networks next-generation CN-Series firewall, the IoT Security solution uses machine learning (ML) to provide visibility of discovered IoT devices based on the meta-data in the logs it receives from the firewall. IoT Security also identifies vulnerabilities and assess risk in devices based on their network traffic behaviors and dynamically updated threat feeds.

You can use the policy rule recommendations that IoT Security generates as a reference when manually adding rules to your CN-Series firewall. IoT Security always generates Security policy rule recommendations regardless of the PAN-OS version.

For more information, see IoT Security Prerequisites.

Session resiliency allows the VM-Series firewall deployed in a cluster on AWS or GCP to maintain session continuity during a failure event. The AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) and GCP Network Load Balancer (NLB) can detect and deregister unhealthy VM-Series firewalls deployed in a horizontally scalable cluster behind. With session resiliency enabled, the GWLB and NLB can rehash existing traffic sessions flowing toward an unhealthy VM-Series and redirect the traffic to a healthy VM-Series firewall.

To maintain sessions failing over to healthy VM-Series firewalls, you must deploy a Redis cache accessible to your VM-Series firewalls— ElastiCache for Redis for AWS and Memorystore for Redis for GCP. The Redis cache maintains session information. When your load balancer detects an unhealthy VM-Series firewall, the load balancer rebalances traffic to a healthy VM-Series firewall. The healthy VM-Series firewall accesses the Redis cache for session information and continues to inspect and forward the existing traffic.

Enable session resiliency on the VM-Series firewall by passing the configuration as part of a bootstrapping init-cfg.txt file or in the user data field using the following new parameters.

The VM-Series firewall now supports virtual systems only with flexible license and with one virtual system by default. Virtual systems are separate, logical firewall instances within a single physical Palo Alto Networks firewall. Rather than using multiple firewalls, managed service providers and enterprises can use a single pair of firewalls (for high availability) and enable virtual systems on them. The virtual systems are easier to manage coexisting within a firewall. The additional benefits of virtual systems include improved scalability, segmented administration, and reduced capital and operational expenses. For more information, see Benefits of Virtual Systems and Virtual System Components and Segmentation.

The virtual system support on the VM-Series firewall is available on PAN-OS version 11.1.3 and later. You must have a virtual system license to support multiple virtual systems on the VM-Series firewall. Purchase additional licenses based on your requirement up to a maximum number supported on a particular Tier.

Use a flexible VM-Series firewall license and Tier 3 or Tier 4 instances supporting a minimum of 16 vCPUs or more. The VM-Series firewall in Tier 3 instance supports a maximum of 25 virtual systems. The VM-Series firewall in Tier 4 instance, supports a maximum of 100 virtual systems.