Session distribution policies define how PA-5200 and PA-7000 Series firewalls distribute security processing (App-ID, Content-ID, URL filtering, SSL decryption, and IPSec) among dataplane processors (DPs) on the firewall. Each policy is specifically designed for a certain type of network environment and firewall configuration to ensure that the firewall distributes sessions with maximum efficiency. For example, the Hash session distribution policy is best fit for environments that use large scale source NAT.

The number of DPs on a firewall varies based on the firewall model:

The following topics provide information about the available session distribution policies, how to change an active policy, and how to view session distribution statistics.