Palo Alto AWS Deployment with Panaroma

[thatsdanish2]

Hello,

I am extremely new to Palo Alto and trying to find my feet here.. we are planning to procure Palo Alto Firewalls for our AWS Deployment and i need help with some of the basic questions related to it.

1) Is Panaroma similar to what we call a Checkpoint Management Server ? and is it essential to deploy Panaroma along with Palo alto HA/Cluster ?

2) Does Palo alto support HA deployment in 2 different availability zones in AWS ? i.e one member Active in AZ1 and other one in AZ2 

any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[BPry · Accepted solution]

1) Is Panaroma similar to what we call a Checkpoint Management Server ? and is it essential to deploy Panaroma along with Palo alto HA/Cluster ?

Nope. There were some things within Checkpoint that could only be used if you had a Management Server setup and configured. That's absolutely not the case with Panorama. While there are some plugins that are Panorama only, you absolutely don't need to have Panorama configured in your environment for any firewall features or to do anything with high-availability. 

2) Does Palo alto support HA deployment in 2 different availability zones in AWS ? i.e one member Active in AZ1 and other one in AZ2 

Nope. To configure HA on AWS the firewalls need to be in the same availability zone. You could easily bypass this by using a load balancer and splitting two firewalls across availability zones. If you manage the firewall through XML you could template your configuration so that the configuration was the same across both devices minus device-specific variables.