Beginning with PAN-OS 10.2, the maximum number of sessions supported on an individual VM-Series firewall scales with the amount of memory allocated to the VM-Series instance. Because memory increments are not locked in place, you can increase the amount of memory as needed for your environment. For example, if your VM-Series is assigned 16GB of memory (2,000,000 sessions) but you need to support 3,000,000 sessions, you can increase the memory to 24GB instead of having to jump all the way to 56GB as in previous PAN-OS releases. Therefore, in deployments where resources are tight, you no longer need to statically allocate more memory than necessary to achieve the capacity you require.

For linear scaling, increments of memory are grouped into tiers that represent the configuration capacity of the VM-Series firewall. Regardless of the amount of memory you assign to a VM-Series firewall instance, the tier that amount of memory falls into determine the limit for non-sessions values, such as security rules, address objects, security profiles, etc.

This feature is enabled by default and requires no configuration on the VM-Series firewall. VM-Series firewall capacity scales dynamically with the allocated memory.