I use Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for testing purposes of VMs.

The main advantage of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series stems from the fact that you can access it with the help of cloud services.

With Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, it is hard for me to manage its network configuration part. Regarding Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, I am figuring out whether to use interzone or intrazone networks for the VMs in our company's environment, which is very confusing. The aforementioned aspects of the solution can be considered for improvement.

In the future, whenever I try to onboard Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, it should allow for easy configuration, especially in terms of network connectivity. I want an easier setup and configuration in the product's future releases.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for around a year. My company has a partnership with Palo Alto Networks.

The technical support of Palo Alto Networks does reply to the cases or issues I file with the support team. The support is equally good for all the products that fall under Palo Alto Networks. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the implementation process a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

During the implementation process of the product, I faced some issues related to the networking part and connectivity of VMs. I faced issues with how an end user could connect the VMs to a firewall or connect a firewall to VMs, but the same process was easy for me on a physical device firewall.

I am more comfortable with the physical device firewall. I am actually trying to figure out things since I am not very familiar with the VM side of Palo Alto.

I would recommend Palo Alto Networks VM-Series since it is a cheaper product compared to the other tools available in the market. Apart from Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, I usually recommend Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We use Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for our company's customers, especially those who use Azure Firewall to secure their environment but still want a third-party firewall from companies like Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto in their environment. Whenever our company's customers want to opt for a third-party firewall, we suggest firewall products from companies like Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto. There have been cases where our company's customer who already uses firewall products from Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto deployed on an on-premises model want to shift the same product to the cloud, going on the good experience they have had with the products. If our company's customers are not interested in purchasing a third-party firewall, my company suggests the cloud-native firewall provided by Azure, specifically for their landing zone environment.

Regarding Palo Alto, my company normally does a high availability configuration for our customers, which are active-active and active-passive. There are multiple add-on packages a customer can choose from in Palo Alto, including antivirus, web filtering, IDS, and IPS solutions.

Considering Azure, some customers may purchase Palo Alto Networks VM-300. Considering the pricing perspective, customers want multiple NIC types because they might have different spokes, and they may like to extend it with different interfaces on different spokes. Considering VM-Series on Azure Virtual Machines, since there is a limitation when it comes to Azure VM-300 as it supports only four cores, there may be some modifications made to support more cores.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for three to four years. My company functions as a managed service provider and an integrator for Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series can be made more stable. I have seen some bugs in the solution. After deployment with an API call, you can use an HA solution in two scenarios, namely, as a load balancer and for API calls. I see that in the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, there are some delays when it comes to an API call configuration.

It is a scalable tool. Considering the licensing part of the solution, it may not seem scalable, especially when you want to move from Palo Alto Networks VM-300 to Palo Alto Networks VM-500 since, for such a procedure, the virtual machines will have to be brought down and registered again with a different license, which is challenging.

My company's customers who use the solution are mostly enterprise-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support has been good. I rate the technical support a seven and a half to eight out of ten.

There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers. There are also some problems related to the understanding of our company's issues with the product by Palo Alto's support team.

Positive

Users are provided with templates to go ahead with the deployment phase of Azure. There are already prepared templates available for installation, which users can use during installation.

Suppose our company's discussions with the customers are completed, and the design has been frozen. Considering the aforementioned case, the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series installation phase can be completed in a couple of hours, while the only time-consuming task is the creation of policies.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain.

From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market.

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

The tool's cloud version makes application migration easy. 

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series needs to improve its order process. 

I have been working with the solution for two years. 

I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series' deployment is not difficult. 

The solution is expensive. I rate its pricing a three out of ten. 

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is an enterprise product because it is costly. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use Palo Alto Networks VM-Series primarily for security purposes. It helps us with URL filtering, domain blocking, threat analysis, and detecting vulnerabilities.

We can monitor the traffic manually and detect threats. Additionally, we can block different IP addresses and URLs.

There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for six years.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the product's stability a seven out of ten. It could be better. We have four users for it at the moment. We plan to increase the number of devices.

We receive technical support from a local partner rather than directly from the vendor. The support team requires more training.

Positive

We have used Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) before. Compared to Palo Alto, Cisco devices are not feasible regarding hardware. They are very slow and complicated to find the granular level of results. Sometimes, even a technical expert is unable to fetch a proper report.

I rate the initial setup process an eight out of ten. It takes eight hours to complete and requires one security engineer to execute the process. The deployment involves setting up security policies. The on-premise installation is simple. However, VM installation is complicated in terms of the network interface.

It is an expensive product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. We purchased a three-year license for it.

I rate Palo Alto Networks VM-Series an eight out of ten.

We use the product to mitigate vulnerabilities for the applications running on particular VMs.

The product's most valuable feature is pricing.

Compared to Azure Firewall, the product could be better in terms of performance.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for three years.

The product is stable.

It is an easy-to-scale product and suitable for enterprises.

Palo Alto's support is good. Whenever I raise a ticket, they immediately look into it and make a Zoom call.

Positive

I have used Cisco's Next-Generation Firewall before. It works better than Palo Alto.

Palo Alto's installation process is easy because we use Panorama tool to manage it. We can communicate and implement traffic policies, filtering, and other specific options with its help.

It requires two to three engineers and takes two days to complete the deployment. For maintenance, it requires a team of two engineers.

It's good to work with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series. I recommend it to others and rate it an eight out of ten.

The main concern is VPN. If you're using Azure Firewall, you still need a VPN gateway to terminate your VPN connection. Azure Firewall doesn't remove the need for another VPN gateway, especially for point-to-site VPN. So you have to use another VPN appliance. With Palo Alto and FortiGate, for example, you can have an all-in-one solution. The VPN gateway and all the other features are available.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series has everything centralized. You have the VPN solution, firewall, routing, UDR, flexibility, updates, and full visibility of your traffic. You can also perform log debugging. It provides all the things that Azure's firewall doesn't offer. Plus, you have full ownership of your device.

Firstly, Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos. This would help people learn and deploy the product more easily. Even if the product itself is excellent, lacking proper documentation and troubleshooting guidance renders it less useful. It won't be helpful even if it's rock solid but lacks sufficient information and tutorials.

I've been using Palo Alto as a VM for about three months. I use the latest version.

It is a stable solution. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We have more than 20 entities using this solution. 

Customer service and support are great. The response time is good. My experience with them was very good. 

I used Azure Firewall for a while, but then I removed it and installed Palo Alto.

The setup requires professional people to work on it. It's not straightforward. Knowledge is needed to adapt it to your platform. 

So, it's not an entry-level solution; it requires professional and expert-level skills.

I deployed the solution myself. The deployment process took about three to four days. It depends on your production environment because I had to migrate production.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance. 

I can't make a suggestion because it depends on the specific needs they have. They can consider using the entry-level version or opt for the expert lab, depending on their workload.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.