New Software NGFW Credits and Videos

[jdelio]

Hello everyone, 

With all of the advancements that Palo Alto Networks has made as a company, I think that licensing had remained as one of the pain points for users consuming Software Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW). If you haven't already seen the news, and to make your lives easier, we were recently happy to announce the release of Software NGFW Credits. With this program, you are now able to sit back and manage your Software NGFW's through the Customer Support Portal (CSP), as well as some features on the firewalls themselves.

To me, the best part of this new solution is the ability to scale. The ability to distribute credits, enable and disable firewalls very easily and quickly is so very convenient. 

Changing from a license-based model to a credit-based model is going to make so many things easier. 

Videos

Videos always help to visualize and explain things quickly when you want to understand how something works, and these perfectly show how to manage NGFW credits. 

We have broken down them into 6 chapters, and a Bonus 7th chapter is planned in the next week, so stay tuned.

Chapter 1 - Activation Email

Chapter 2 - Credit Access Control

Chapter 3 - Credit Management & Deployment Profiles

Chapter 4 - Register & Deactivate Software Firewalls

Chapter 5 - Using Credits for Panorama Management

Chapter 6 - Transferring Credits

Software NGFW Credits Playlist
Here's a link to the entire playlist on our LIVEcommunity channel on YouTube.

More Info

For even more information about Software NGFW credits, please see the following resources. 

Lots of great info is included in the Palo Alto Networks Software NGFW Blog:

New: The Industry’s Most Flexible Software NGFW Consumption Model

For more technical information, please see Palo Alto Networks Datasheet:

Capitalize on the New Flexible Firewall Consumption Model

From the documentation side, please don't miss out on the VM-Series deployment guide about Software NGFW credits here:

VM-Series Deployment guide - Software NGFW Credits

Thanks for taking time to read my blog.
If you enjoyed this, please hit the Like (thumb up) button, don't forget to subscribe to the LIVEcommunity Blog area.

As always, we welcome all comments and feedback in the comments section below.

Stay Secure,
Joe Delio
End of line

[MonicaR]

Hi Joe, Excellent post ! very useful!

I have a doubt ... the VM panorama for management is working as management only mode or as panorama mode? It´s not clear to me.

[pkhavkine]

So how do you acquire these tokens/credits?

[jdelio]

@pkhavkine You acquire the credits by purchasing them thru the normal sales channels. Same way you would be purchasing the software/hardware through.

[MonicaR]

what happens if I choose to create a deployment profile indicating PAN-OS version will be running on 10.0.3 and below and after a while, I want to make an upgrade to 10.0.4 or later, I have to create a new deployment profile? or how this change will be manage?

[Gustavo_Aristi]

Hi @jdelio  At what point do you request or specify an expiration? What if you want 5 years for example.

The credit estimator tool does not have that option and I can't see any details anywhere.

Thanks!

[Gustavo_Aristi]

In case anyone is wondering the same thing. The answer to my question above is:

Expiration is assigned/selected at the time of creating the quote in the system. No need to worry about it while estimating the amount of credits.

[kwilliams254]

Sir,

I have followed the documentation but am unable to create the NGFW's for utilization in a lab environment without an authorization code.  I have the available credits as well as have them allocated 

Am I missing something?