Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Enabling virtual systems

Enabling virtual systems (VSYSes) on a firewall makes it into a multi-tenant system. Each VSYS represents a virtual firewall instance that can operate independently while sharing the resources available on the host system. The host system still retains control over all networking functions (interfaces and their configurations, routing tables, IPSec and GRE tunnels, DHCP, DNS proxy, and so on) and the management configuration. Each VSYS can be assigned its own (sub) interfaces and routing can either be taken care of at the system level or by creating virtual routers and assigning them to each VSYS.

Important note

By default, each firewall creates its objects in vsys1. This is the native VSYS even for devices that do not support multi-VSYS. Objects created in vsys1 or any other VSYS will not be visible to other VSYSes unless its location is set as shared.

Only the larger physical platforms (PA-3220 and up as of time of writing) support multi-VSYS mode...