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VM-Series Deployment Guide

VM-Series System Requirements

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VM-Series System Requirements

System Requirements for VM-Series models (fixed vCPUs).

Each instance of the VM-Series firewall requires a minimum resource allocation—number of CPUs, memory, and disk space, on its host server. Use the table below to verify that you allocate the necessary hardware resources for your VM-Series model or memory profile.

PAN-OS 11.0 adds additional feature and capabilities hence needs a little more memory. To provide the same session scale as a pre-PAN-OS 10.2 release, you need to increase the minimum memory allocation. In the case where you do not increase the minimum memory from pre-PAN-OS 11.0 configurations, the max session scale is reduced.

VM-Series Model	Supported Hypervisors	Supported VCPUs	Minimum Memory	Minimum Memory with GTP Enabled	Minimum Hard Drive	Maximum (Legacy) Session Count	Scaled Session in PAN-OS 10.2*	Recommended Memory for Legacy Session Count
VM-50	ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM	2	5.5GB 4.5GB in Lite mode	6GB 5GB in Lite mode	32GB (60GB at boot)	65,000 50,000 in Lite mode	50,000 25,000 in Lite mode	6GB 5.5GB
VM-100	AWS, Azure, ESXi, Google Cloud Platform, Hyper-V, KVM, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Cisco ACI, Cisco CSP, Cisco ENCS, NSX-T (VM-100) The VM-100 on Azure requires 4 vCPUs.	2	6.5GB	7.5GB	60GB	250,000	200,000	7GB
VM-300	AWS, Azure, ESXi, Google Cloud Platform, Hyper-V, KVM, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Cisco ACI, Cisco CSP, Cisco ENCS, NSX-T (VM-300)	2, 4	9GB**	10GB	60GB	800,000	600,000	10GB
VM-500	AWS, Azure, Cisco ACI, Cisco CSP, ESXi, Google Cloud Platform, Hyper-V, KVM, OCI, NSX-T	2, 4, 8	16GB	20GB	60GB	2,000,000	1,800,000	18GB
VM-700	AWS, Azure, ESXi, Google Cloud Platform, Hyper-V, KVM, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Cisco ACI, Cisco CSP, NSX-T	2, 4, 8, 16	56GB	64GB	60GB	10,000,000	10,000,000	56GB

*Fixed model VM-Series firewalls with licenses funded by Software NGFW Credits.

**In PAN-OS 11.0, 9GB might be insufficient depending upon the feature set or combination of feature sets (such as GTP or high-performance features) used on the firewall. If you experience memory resource related issues, increase memory to 11GB to accommodate the additional memory requirements of some of the features or combination of features.

***In PAN-OS 11.0, an additional 4GB memory increase is needed (20GB) to accommodate for the memory requirements of the Web Proxy feature.

You can enable Lite mode on the VM-50. Lite mode is an alternative operating mode for environments where resources are limited. See VM-50 Lite Mode for more information.

To achieve the best performance, all of the needed cores should be available on a single CPU socket.

For operation, the VM-50 firewall requires minimum 32GB of hard drive space. However, because the VM-Series base image is common to all models, you must allocate 60GB of hard drive space until you license the VM-50.

The number of vCPUs assigned to the management plane and those assigned to the dataplane differs depending on the total number of vCPUs assigned to the VM-Series firewall. If you assign more vCPUs than those officially supported by the license, any additional vCPUs are assigned to the management plane.

Total vCPUs	Management Plane vCPUs	Dataplane vCPUs
2	1	1
4	2	2
8	2	6
16	4	12

VM-Series Models

CPU Oversubscription