Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By : Vladimir Yakovlev
Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By: Vladimir Yakovlev

Overview of this book

Check Point firewalls are the premiere firewalls, access control, and threat prevention appliances for physical and virtual infrastructures. With Check Point’s superior security, administrators can help maintain confidentiality, integrity, and the availability of their resources protected by firewalls and threat prevention devices. This hands-on guide covers everything you need to be fluent in using Check Point firewalls for your operations. This book familiarizes you with Check Point firewalls and their most common implementation scenarios, showing you how to deploy them from scratch. You will begin by following the deployment and configuration of Check Point products and advance to their administration for an organization. Once you’ve learned how to plan, prepare, and implement Check Point infrastructure components and grasped the fundamental principles of their operation, you’ll be guided through the creation and modification of access control policies of increasing complexity, as well as the inclusion of additional features. To run your routine operations infallibly, you’ll also learn how to monitor security logs and dashboards. Generating reports detailing current or historical traffic patterns and security incidents is also covered. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge necessary to implement and comfortably operate Check Point firewalls.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Check Point, Network Topology, and Firewalls in Your Infrastructure and Lab
6
Part 2: Introduction to Gaia, Check Point Management Interfaces, Objects, and NAT
13
Part 3: Introduction to Practical Administration for Achieving Common Objectives

ClusterXL in HA mode

The prerequisites for an HA cluster are that it should comprise identical hardware (either physical or virtual), which, in its stable production state, runs identical versions of Check Point software. The caveat of a stable production state is that it is possible to use Multi-Version Cluster (MVC) mode during its transition to R81.10 or higher versions. This is not without certain limitations, but it allows for more gradual upgrades to verify new version stability and provide an easier fallback to earlier versions.

HA mode is defined in the ClusterXL and VRRP section of the cluster properties [1]. Under Select the cluster mode and configuration [2], we have two options, ClusterXL and VRRP. ClusterXL is selected by default [3] and, unless you have a very specific reason to use VRRP, ClusterXL should be your choice, as it provides the best failover experience. Under Tracking, the default selected option is to Log with additional alerting options available in the...