Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

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

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

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. This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources. By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Setting up High Availability

High Availability (HA) is a configuration where two identical (the same chassis or VM version) firewalls are connected to form a cluster. When clustering is enabled, both systems will form a single entity to the outside and will handle failover for certain problems, so the service remains available to users. These types of monitoring are, or can be, performed in a cluster member to ensure its own and its peers’ health:

  • Link monitoring: If an interface goes down, the member fails
  • Path monitoring: If an IP becomes unavailable, the member fails
  • Heartbeat monitoring: The peers periodically send heartbeat packages and hello messages to verify they are up and running
  • Hardware monitoring: The member continually performs packet path health monitoring on its own hardware and fails if a malfunction is detected

When you enable HA, you need to select a Group ID. This ID needs to be identical on both members. The Group ID...