Panorama 11.1 Recommended AWS Instance Size

[T.Bryant250413]

Running Panorama that manages two firewalls in a small deployment, the current instance size is c5.4xlarge, which I believe is excessive for CPU and memory usage.

Is it okay to use a different instance size, like m6i.2xlarge or smaller? I understand the documentation recommends 16 CPUs and 64GB RAM for 11.1 and later. https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/panorama/11-1/panorama-admin/set-up-panorama/set-up-the-panorama-v...

My team forwards logs to Splunk, so there's no heavy log rate requirement. Looking to save costs overall, is anyone else running smaller instance sizes than the recommended minimum?

[JayGolf]

Hi @T.Bryant250413 ,

I hear you. I can’t count the number of times AWS budget reviews happen and the Palo EC2s are that one persistent line item that always gets attention compared to other services being utilized $$$$.

My .2: I’ve personally never run anything below the documented minimum requirements. Most of my experience has been supporting medium to large enterprise environments, so I’ve generally stayed aligned with supported sizing guidance rather than experimenting below it.

If this is a production deployment, I would strongly encourage meeting or exceeding the minimum requirements for PAN-OS 11.1.

In smaller environments, steady-state utilization may appear low. However, the minimum guidance is designed to support the PAN-OS management plane architecture including commit processing, internal configuration databases, object expansion, upgrade operations (software and dynamic), and all of the jobs of processes running in the background that make panos run... 

Also, running the documented requirements also ensures full support alignment if performance or stability concerns arise. If you run into issues and contact support, the first thing that they will recommend is to bump up to the min reqs.