Express route bandwidth halved when using VM300 firewall

[tchark]

Hi All, we currently have a vm300 firewall acting as our security perimeter device in azure.

I have setup the high availability using a standard microsoft internal load balancer for HA, but im finding that my bandwidth is halved when accessing azure VMs through the firewall.

when i remove the firewalls from the environment, i get above 500Mbps when testing with iperf, but when i reintroduce the firewalls and test using iperf, im finding i get less than 250Mbps.

Is there some additional feature in the palo altos that is slowing things down? i have purchased the bundle 1 PAYG option within azure meaning we dont have URL filtering or global protect, and the firewall is configured with only basic policies, so cant see why it would be causing this slowdown.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

thanks guys,

Taib. 

[jperry1]

What Azure Machine size are you using?

What version of PAN-OS are you using?