Nominated Discussion: Dual ISP Global Protect Redundancy

This article is based on a discussion, Dual ISP Global Protect Redundancy, posted by @DonohoeRobert. Thank you for the insight!

Hi Team,

I hope ye all are well. We recently worked a case for a customer that had dual ISP configuration and wanted the Palo Alto Networks device to provide redundancy for the Global Protect Portal and Gateways in the event one ISP went down. We came up with a handy way of providing this using NAT rules and a loopback and I am posting this to share with the community.

There are some screenshots from the lab below. Eth1/1 & Eth1/2 represent ISP-A and ISP-B.

We popped the Global Protect Portal and Gateway on a loopback interface.

We created two NAT rules to bounce the incoming traffic whether its from ISP-A or ISP-B to the loopback address.

The system has two Virtual Routers for both ISP's. VR-A and VR-B. VR-A has the loopback interface added.

Virtual Router B has a static route to VR-A which has a route to the loopback interface with the Portal and Gateway.

This simple setup allows access to the portal and gateway from either ISP interfaces. We simulated one ISP failing and changed the A record of the portal fqdn to resolve to the other interface and the users could connect without any input or changes from the end user. There are a number of ways to automate dns integrity and failover to resolve to a different ip address if it can't resolve to another. Beyond the scope of Palo Alto. Infoblox and Route 53 can provide these features. If you just have an MS server, changing the A record from one IP to another isn't a massive task.

Hope this helps few others and is nice way to provide an extra layer of redundancy for networks to big to fail.

Best regards,

Robert D