Friday, July 10, 2020

Switching performance of virtualized firewalls (PAN)

Wondering if anyone has experience with running VM firewalls and what kind of switching performance to expect from them.

We're currently running a PA-850 HA stack and routing everything on it (except virtualization clusters and server storage, run on their a ToR Mellanox 100G), with honestly great results. It's super easy to manage and performance is currently sufficient.

We were looking to upgrade to PA-3260s to prepare for future expansion but a thought came to mind... how do VM firewalls perform at the switching level? Would a top of the line VM (in PAN's case that would be a VM-500 or VM-700) running on recent hardware (we just got some new dual 64 core/1TB RAM hosts so we'd be able to reserve plenty of resources to the firewalls) be capable of routing a couple dozen subnets at a physical production site, with everything from latency-sensitive industrial equipment to wifi to hundreds of endpoints?

Or should VM firewall still be relegated to fully virtualized cloud environments?



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