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VM-Series Deployment Guide

Add Additional Disk Space to the VM-Series Firewall

Table of Contents

Add Additional Disk Space to the VM-Series Firewall

The VM-Series firewall requires a 60GB virtual disk, of which 21GB is used for logging, by default.

For large deployments, use Panorama to aggregate data from all next-generation firewalls, and provide visibility across all the traffic on your network. Panorama provides centralized logging and reporting.
In smaller deployments where you do not use Panorama, you can add a new virtual disk to increase log storage capacity. The new virtual disk can support 60GB to 2TB of storage capacity for logs. This task is described below.

When the virtual appliance is configured to use a virtual disk, the VM-Series firewall no longer stores logs. If the appliance loses connectivity to the virtual disk, logs can be lost during the failure interval. If necessary, place the newly created virtual disk on a datastore that provides RAID redundancy. RAID10 provides the best write performance for applications with high logging characteristics.

Power off the VM-Series firewall.
On the ESXi server, add the virtual disk to the firewall.
1. Select the VM-Series firewall on the ESXi server.
2. Click Edit Settings.
3. Click Add to launch the Add Hardware wizard, and select the following options when prompted:
  1. Select Hard Disk for the hardware type.
  2. Select Create a new virtual disk.
  3. Select SCSI as the virtual disk type.
  4. Select the Thick provisioning disk format.
  5. In the location field, select Store with the virtual machine option. The datastore does not have to reside on the ESXi server.
  6. Verify that the settings look correct and click Finish to exit the wizard. The new disk is added to the list of devices for the virtual appliance.
Power on the firewall.
Powering on the firewall initializes the virtual disk for first-time use. The time that the initialization process takes to complete varies by the size of the new virtual disk.
When the new virtual disk is initialized and ready, PAN-OS moves all logs from the existing disk to the new virtual disk. New log entries are now written to this new virtual disk.
PAN-OS also generates a system log entry that records the new disk.

If you reuse a virtual disk that was previously used for storing PAN-OS logs, all logs from the existing disk are overwritten.
Verify the size of the new virtual disk.
1. Select DeviceSetupManagement.
2. In the Logging and Reporting Settings section, verify that the Log Storage capacity accurately displays the new disk capacity.

Perform Initial Configuration on the VM-Series on ESXi

Use VMware Tools on the VM-Series Firewall on ESXi and vCloud Air