Customize Service Routes for a Virtual System
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Customize Service Routes for a Virtual System

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Customize Service Routes for a Virtual System

When a firewall is enabled for multiple virtual systems, the virtual systems inherit the global service and service route settings. For example, the firewall can use a shared email server to originate email alerts to all virtual systems. In some scenarios, you’d want to create different service routes for each virtual system.
One use case for configuring service routes at the virtual system level is if you are an ISP who needs to support multiple individual tenants on a single Palo Alto Networks firewall. Each tenant requires custom service routes to access service such as DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, NetFlow, RADIUS, TACACS+, Multi-Factor Authentication, email, SNMP trap, syslog, HTTP, User-ID Agent, VM Monitor, and Panorama (deployment of content and software updates). Another use case is an IT organization that wants to provide full autonomy to groups that set servers for services. Each group can have a virtual system and define its own service routes.
You can select a virtual router for a service route in a virtual system; you cannot select the egress interface. After you select the virtual router and the firewall sends the packet from the virtual router, the firewall selects the egress interface based on the destination IP address. Therefore, if a virtual system has multiple virtual routers, packets to all of the servers for a service must egress out of only one virtual router. A packet with an interface source address may egress a different interface, but the return traffic would be on the interface that has the source IP address, creating asymmetric traffic.