Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Reviews

• To do a lot of intrusion detection.
• Threat prevention.
• As an application firewall, to be able to securely deliver apps to the public.

It gives us the ease that we are secure. We have set up the proper things that help make our data safe. This is the biggest benefit.

It offers a single pane of glass for all the different types of installations.

The easy of use is pretty good.

I would like a way to do everything programmatically, or be able to copy the configs from different prices at different levels.

The stability is excellent. We have about 50 to 60 employees on it per day. Then, we have about 100 edge connected devices coming through it as well.

It is definitely scalable. We have about 100 users with about 200 to 300 instances on the cloud that we protect.

The technical support is really good. It is usually one phone call to get everything done if we are having an issue.

We chose to purchase Palo Alto through the AWS Marketplace because we needed an easy to use firewall and a way to protect our public applications and services.

The integration and configuration on our AWS environment was pretty simple. We did not have to ask any questions about anything on it, so it was good.

We haven't had any security issues since deploying it.

Purchasing on the AWS Marketplace was simple, effective, and easy.

The price is not bad. They have a yearly renewal fee, and the pricing is exactly where we expect it to be.

We also evaluated Fortinet, but Palo Alto is sort of the new up and coming product. There were a lot of good recommendations from other security experts.

In addition, Palo Alto is easier to configure when you are building policies on applications. 

Talk to their technical services to make sure you are getting the right size solution for what you want to do.

The product is easy use. I don't have to think twice when I am using it. I know it is doing its job. Customer support has been great.

We are using both the AWS and on-premise versions. Both versions are about the same. The interface is nice and easy to configure. I like that it seems like it is one platform to manage.

The most effective features for threat prevention are application-based prevention and WildFire. These features cover various threats, such as ransomware, malware, etc. They provide real-time visibility. By applying appropriate policies, threats can be blocked.

The solution needs to improve its visibility. It's not straightforward to use. Understanding the policies, authorizations, and initializing features requires careful review. The product needs to offer proper training. 

I have been working with the product for three to four months. 

I rate Palo Alto Networks VM-Series' stability as ten out of ten. 

The main issue with the tool's support is the delayed response time, ranging from one to two hours. This delay can impact customers who are waiting for support. Additionally, partners may become busy. 

Positive

The tool's improvement in cloud security posture depends on the features used and the licenses purchased. Different suites are available, such as Professional, Core, and Enterprise, each offering various features for endpoint.

Competitors such as Fortinet and Check Point also offer similar features, but I don't know much about their offerings. However, Palo Alto Network VM-Series stands out with its application deployment capability, iOS zone protection, and features like application ID, user ID, and device ID identification. These features enable policy application and on-premises protection, which may not be available in competing solutions.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for our company's customers, especially those who use Azure Firewall to secure their environment but still want a third-party firewall from companies like Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto in their environment. Whenever our company's customers want to opt for a third-party firewall, we suggest firewall products from companies like Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto. There have been cases where our company's customer who already uses firewall products from Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto deployed on an on-premises model want to shift the same product to the cloud, going on the good experience they have had with the products. If our company's customers are not interested in purchasing a third-party firewall, my company suggests the cloud-native firewall provided by Azure, specifically for their landing zone environment.

Regarding Palo Alto, my company normally does a high availability configuration for our customers, which are active-active and active-passive. There are multiple add-on packages a customer can choose from in Palo Alto, including antivirus, web filtering, IDS, and IPS solutions.

Considering Azure, some customers may purchase Palo Alto Networks VM-300. Considering the pricing perspective, customers want multiple NIC types because they might have different spokes, and they may like to extend it with different interfaces on different spokes. Considering VM-Series on Azure Virtual Machines, since there is a limitation when it comes to Azure VM-300 as it supports only four cores, there may be some modifications made to support more cores.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for three to four years. My company functions as a managed service provider and an integrator for Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series can be made more stable. I have seen some bugs in the solution. After deployment with an API call, you can use an HA solution in two scenarios, namely, as a load balancer and for API calls. I see that in the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, there are some delays when it comes to an API call configuration.

It is a scalable tool. Considering the licensing part of the solution, it may not seem scalable, especially when you want to move from Palo Alto Networks VM-300 to Palo Alto Networks VM-500 since, for such a procedure, the virtual machines will have to be brought down and registered again with a different license, which is challenging.

My company's customers who use the solution are mostly enterprise-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support has been good. I rate the technical support a seven and a half to eight out of ten.

There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers. There are also some problems related to the understanding of our company's issues with the product by Palo Alto's support team.

Positive

Users are provided with templates to go ahead with the deployment phase of Azure. There are already prepared templates available for installation, which users can use during installation.

Suppose our company's discussions with the customers are completed, and the design has been frozen. Considering the aforementioned case, the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series installation phase can be completed in a couple of hours, while the only time-consuming task is the creation of policies.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain.

From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market.

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

For this VM in particular, it is microsegmentation which is used for implementing the firewall inside the data center.

When talking about the VM or the virtual firewall, it is mostly about the sessioncapacities that it can handle. In the early version of the firewall, the session or traffic that it could inspect was low. 

In quite a few releases, they have improved a lot. They started with the physical firewall, therefore it is almost virtually the same firewall with the same features, only that it is a virtual one. The main improvements that they have made are surrounding the processing capacity for the virtual machines.

The granularity which is used to confirm applications based in users. 

When you have VMware NSX, it is easy to deploy this virtual firewall because it is fully integrated with the VM solution. If I want to segment any type of network inside the data center, it is about two or three clicks, and it works.

The reporting. There are various reports that come with the box or with VMware, but you can only run them daily. If you want to generate a report from this week or the past month, you have to create a custom report. It is not that difficult, but I expect these reports to be pre-made. I would like to be able to choose the dates that I can run the reports. As of now, you can only run it for the day before, so this is one improvement they need to make. 

From time to time, maybe twice a year, they have released content updates which have some issues. When they release content updates, the applications with these updates give us a false positives. I manage older software developers and members, and almost everyone has one or two missteps a year regarding these updates.

The Series 2000 version of Palo Alto were somewhat big for small or medium customers. They did not have a middle box. 

In the newer version (3850s), all of them are scalable. They fit better into medium or small businesses, so it is easy for us. E.g, if we have a VMware 500 appliance, we can upgrade it to a 100. They have improved in this way.

The technical support is extremely good. They are a 10 out of 10, not only because of their fast response time, but their knowledgeable personnel as well. They have knowledge regarding very specific issues. 

When we finish creating tickets in the support portal, there are a lot of knowledge-based documents. They answer almost immediately, calling you back about 10 minutes later. When creating a support ticket, I always get a quick answer.

I was using Cisco, but I was using the old Cisco. The firewall was the only working protocol. The Palo Alto Network Firewall is a Next-Generation Firewall, so it is a lot different. 

This is the first and only Next-Generation Firewall that I have used. I have put in several Sophos Firewalls, but they are not the same as Palo Alto.

You will need to know what are you doing with the firewall. 

It's different than Sophos or Fortinet where you only need to click two or three times, and it puts you in engaged mode in the simplest way. 

With Palo Alto, you need to know where you are going to be implementing and what architectures you want. It is not complicated, but it is not as easy as Sophos or Fortinet, because when you start with these two firewalls, the quick setup wizard chooses for you and it automatically creates for you network rules.

With Palo Alto, you need to do all those steps manually, but it is somewhat better because it gives you the flexibility to choose how you want your network set up and how you are going to segment the networks.

I know Palo Alto is not cheap because my finance team has been telling me that it is not a cheap solution. It is about the maturity of your security team or infrastructure team and whom you want to work with no matter how big your organization is: small, medium, or large.

The newest version of Cisco, the Next-Generation Firewall, is less expensive than Palo Alto. The price is more comparable to Check Point.

For licensing, it depends how you want to use the firewall. The firewall can be used only for IPS purposes. If you only want that firewall IPS, you will only need a license called threat prevention which includes vulnerabilities, antivirus signatures, and one additional measure; it includes three measures and security updates. 

If you do not want to buy the threat prevention license in the box, you can buy it with only the support license which is for the support of the hardware. It works like a simple firewall. It integrates what it calls user IDs and application IDs. If you do not buy any other license, only the firewall, Palo Alto will also help you improve your security.

We evaluated VanGuard for their Next-Generation Firewall.

We chose between Check Point and Palo Alto for their support teams. Check Point is very bad for support. We switched from Check Point to Palo Alto.

If you do not have a Next-Generation Firewall, Palo Alto is a good choice. It is reliable and the support is very good. The VMware version is in all the boxes and they use the same OS, so it is not different if you manage a physical box or a virtual box. The only difference is the virtual box depends on where it will be placed, and its main usage is for microsegmentation and data center firewalls.

We use it for firewall purposes.

We use it mostly for the firewall and its ability to work in AWS. That is why we like it.

AWS has improved our agility to apply firewall rules. It has reduced the amount of time that it takes to apply firewall rules because everything is based in the cloud. It helps us to bring agility to the project teams when applying them.

We still need to understand what are the best practices which we need to implement. 

We also don't know how it will scale once we start putting more load on it.

We like its stability.

We are happy with the scalability. 

We just started migrating to the cloud. Thus, we are slowly adding more volume to it. Maybe next year, we should know how it is scaling in the cloud.

We have in-house experts and a good relationship with the Palo Alto technical support team.

We were using a lot of Cisco firewalls before. We switched because we wanted what works best in the cloud.

We have been happy with the configuration and implementation on the AWS environment.

It takes the bottleneck away from the information security teams and increases their agility on projects. 

We found purchasing process the product on the AWS Marketplace to be very good. We used the AWS Marketplace because we were set to move to AWS. We rely on Amazon and their partners to process our research.

I would recommend to try it out.

Palo Alto VM Series is a firewall that makes up part of our security solution, handing IPS, IDS, and other security measures.

The most valuable features are web control and IPS/IDS.

The work from home features, VPN and SSL VPN, are useful and part of the GlobalProtect functionality.

I would like to have automatic daily reporting, such as how many users have connected via SSL VPN. As it is now, we have to manually look at the logs, which is tedious. There are no ready-made reports on that level and the information is not easily available.

I really need more advanced features that support the correlation of log files.

I have years of experience with the Palo Alto VM Series.

This firewall is quite stable and we haven't faced any kinds of issues.

It is scalable but I cannot really comment on how much because we have not taken it to that level. We have between 450 and 500 users.

I am satisfied with the technical support. However, they regularly provide training on the system so we have rarely opened a support case. 

The initial setup is straightforward and easy. 

The deployment will take a couple of hours at the max and will depend on the configuration that you are looking for. Palo Alto will give you a report that recommends policies that are based on industry standards. For example, if you have approved Telnet access then you will be warned because it is not recommended and you should be using SSH instead. They will give you lots of recommendations to warn that the configuration does not follow the standard practice and if allowed to remain then it will explain what vulnerabilities you might face in the future. This kind of report is really valuable.

I highly recommend this service compared to other vendors. It has everything included in one platform including IPS, IDS, and antivirus. By using the Palo Alto initial configuration, it is going to block many threats from day one and it is pretty easy to do. You don't have to have an in-house technical team that is capable of doing that. You don't require that kind of knowledge, which is important because many people don't understand IDS, IPS, or file blocking. They need experience. With Palo Alto, a normal person with perhaps a year of technical experience will understand how to configure the firewall and generate reports.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The Palo Alto VM-Series is a firewall that is part of our security solution.

With Palo Alto, it feels like you're using the Rolls-Royce of firewalls.

All of the next-generation features are valuable and set Palo Alto apart from other firewalls.

The application filtering, or AppiID, and URL filtering are good.

The interface with Panorama makes it very easy to use.

The command-line interface is something that some people struggle with and I think that they should have an option to go straight to the GUI.

The interface for Panorama has not changed greatly and could be updated.

I have been using Palo Alto VM-Series for more than six years.

It is very easy to scale. All you have to do is get access to the VM base and then spin it off into another virtual environment or send it into the cloud.  This means that you now have a data center through Palo Alto.

They have a new product called Prisma that allows you to create links between remote users working from different areas and use that to connect to the clouds in this infrastructure. It also allows you to get connectivity to that but not using a backhaul. Rather, you connect straight from wherever you are.

In the places where we have deployed this solution, they have a couple of thousand users.

The technical support is great. This is a brand and they have to protect it, so they make sure that the users get what they need.

I have experience with Check Point and Cisco, who both started improving their management interface after Panorama.

I would say that the initial setup is easy. I have been an IT professional for more than 20 years and can say that this is an example of a product where you simply have to read the manual. If you jump straight into it then you will start struggling.

During the initial setup you begin with the CLI, but you enter a command and it brings you to the GUI. Once you are in the GUI, you will see words on the tabs. All of these things are there if you look carefully.

The price of this solution is very high for some parts of Africa, which makes it a challenge. If it were lowered then it would be more popular.

I have been using Palo Alto since version 6.0, and I am currently evaluating the latest one, version 9.1.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to try the trial version first. It is good for 30 days and it can actually be used because it is the full product. You can test all of the scenarios and try the next-generation features. You can use features like the VPN GlobalProtect and actually see it work. The same with URL filtering and antivirus.

Overall, this is a great next-generation firewall.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are security and support.

The packet routing speed is very good.

There should be an option for direct integration with the Azure platform. This would allow this product to take advantage of the auto-scaling that is offered by Azure. Because I am purchasing it as a SaaS model, I should get the complete functionality.

I would like to see the direct support and product ownership from the principal vendor. Ideally, the vendor should maintain ownership and be responsible for the system, including that it is operating correctly. This would give my company a better value when purchasing the product.

The pricing could be improved.

The Panorama management license should come with this solution. We have eight nodes and we still have to purchase it separately. Everything should come with a single license, rather than something that is broken into many parts.

I have been using the Palo Alto VM-Series Firewall for a few months.

This solution is stable.

This is a scalable solution but it would be better if it had direct integration with Microsoft Azure.

Currently, we have three administrators and more than 5,000 end-users through our public website.

Technical support is very good and I would give them full marks.

This firewall is easy to implement. 

Everything from Palo Alto is good and I recommend that people implement this firewall.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.