VM Monitoring of Microsoft® Azure® resources enables you to dynamically update security policy rules to consistently enforce Security policy across all assets deployed within your Azure subscription. VM Monitoring on Azure uses a VM Monitoring script that runs on a virtual machine within the Azure public cloud. This script collects the IP address-to-tag mapping for all your Azure assets and uses the API to push the VM information to your Palo Alto Networks® firewall(s).

To secure your workloads on the Google Cloud Platform, you can now deploy the VM-Series firewall from the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. To scale security with your workloads, deploy one or more instances of the VM-Series firewall behind Google Cloud load balancers and bootstrap the firewall with a complete configuration that includes security policies at launch.

The VM-Series firewall can also natively publish metrics to the Google Stackdriver to monitor and trigger alerts for firewall health and performance. And, to create security policy rules that automatically adapt to changes to your workloads—adds, moves, or deletions of virtual machines in a Google Cloud Platform Project VPC—you can enable VM Monitoring for instances running on Google Cloud Platform on any hardware or VM-Series firewall running PAN-OS 8.1.

The VM-Series firewall for VMware NSX can now provide higher per-host traffic throughput. In addition to PAN-OS 8.1, you must also be running VMware NSX Manager 6.3.1 or higher. NSX Manager 6.3.1 introduced NetX APIs that support multiple device channels and multi-process I/O, allowing the VM-Series firewall to use these device channels to improve performance. NSX allocates device channels equal to the number of dataplane cores assigned to the firewall. When you upgrade to 8.1, your VM-Series firewall deployed in an NSX 6.3.1 or higher environment takes full advantage of the number of maximum effective cores assigned to the dataplane.