topic Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade in General Topics

PA-500 and memory upgrade

BobW — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:09:11 GMT

Recently I ordered and installed the memory upgrade for my PA-500. It was under $400, is a simple end user install and upgraded the management plane to 2gb (from 1gb).

I will not give any estimates as to improvement as I do not want to exaggerate, however, I highly recommend anyone with a PA-500 spend the $400 (ish).

Hope that helps,

Bob

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BCH — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:14:22 GMT

Any chance you could compare the memory swapping before and after the upgrade ? (provided you had already tested this beforehand )

"show system resources" if I remember correctly.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BobW — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:35:34 GMT

Let me just say the difference in the console is noticeable.

Unfortunately I did not take a system resource before. Maybe you could post your stats for a comparison?

I am using 5.0.3. After the upgrade "show system resources" is as follows.

top - 09:33:36 up 1 day, 15:03, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.09, 0.14

Tasks: 102 total, 1 running, 101 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

Cpu(s): 3.4%us, 3.2%sy, 5.9%ni, 87.0%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st

Mem: 2028576k total, 2000836k used, 27740k free, 64768k buffers

Swap: 2212876k total, 924k used, 2211952k free, 887360k cached

Bob

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

Quinton — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:59:09 GMT

Does it improve on commit times? Also does it improve the speed at which reports are generated?

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BobW — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:05:24 GMT

Report generator is absolutely faster, no question. Commit times are almost certainly quicker (but I did not time them).

Bob

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

gafrol — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:24:14 GMT

Can this be done to the 2000 series as well ?

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BCH — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:05:06 GMT

Sadly no, it is only available for PA500

@BobW I'll try to get the info on one of our appliances tomorrow for comparison.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

mikand — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:15:35 GMT

Unfortunately not according to

Edit: Read the comments regarding 2000-series.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BobW — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:45:41 GMT

Anyone have the output of the show system resources of a standard PA-500? I would like to see the difference in memory usage.

Thanks,

Bob

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

licenselu — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:04:31 GMT

Hello,

PA 500 with around 100 users behind it

top - 16:01:41 up 44 days, 6:37, 1 user, load average: 1.11, 0.36, 0.19

Tasks: 100 total, 2 running, 98 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

Cpu(s): 2.9%us, 2.0%sy, 4.3%ni, 90.1%id, 0.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st

Mem: 995872k total, 963276k used, 32596k free, 6576k buffers

Swap: 2212876k total, 477108k used, 1735768k free, 206268k cached

As I can see from your output, in your device, the swap area is not used.

Do you see any difference when you commit (time, etc) ?

Regards,

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

BobW — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:44:57 GMT

Unfortunately I did not do any pretesting. Even if I did it would not have been valid as I took it to 5.0.3 at the same time.

It is my opinion that everything is quicker including the commit process. Fro $400 (ish) I would suggest you give it a shot. Best money I have spent in a while!

Bob

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

scantwell — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:46:27 GMT

Normally, from CLI, when you commit you see dots that show you the progress.

………………..55%.............75%.........90% etc

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student10
55%	1:17	:56
70%	1:31	1:06
98%	1:47	1:23
Complete	2:03	1:40

Based on these times, I would say that there is faster commit times, we saved closed to 25% of the commit time (~30 secs)

Student5 Swap: 2212876k total, 303200k used, 1909676k free, 129612k cached

Student10 Swap: 2008084k total, 0k used, 2008084k free, 1143148k cached

Then, from CLI mode, I loaded a script, which essentially loads a configuration and does the commit automatically.

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student19
55%	1:26	1.15
70%	1:41	1:28
98%	1:50	1:39
Complete	2:06	1:42

We are consistently seeing an increase of load capability and commit response times of 25%.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

Retired Member — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:44:45 GMT

%25 is very nice result.Thanks for test results.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

vchanal — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 14:07:21 GMT

Hi,

Do you know if its possible to upgrade one member of a HA pair only?

Best Regard.

Vincent.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

scantwell — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 16:27:41 GMT

I do not see any problems with upgrading a single FW only. It should not break the HA functionality.

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

tshiv — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 20:59:05 GMT

Hello vchanal,

Is there any specific reason that you would want to upgrade one firewall and not the other in HA cluster? Although it will not break the HA functionality, it might result in synchronization issues. It will also generate lot of unnecessary logging on the system indicating software mismatch. It is recommended to have both the firewalls that are part of the same HA cluster on the same software version.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Re: PA-500 and memory upgrade

vchanal — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 08:28:22 GMT

Hello Tshiv,

Thank you for your answer. I will advice my customer to replace both of them.

Regards

Vincent.