The VM-50 Lite is a resource optimized mode of the VM-50 firewall with a smaller memory footprint. This mode allows you to deploy the VM-Series firewall in environments where resources are limited while providing the same performance and features as the standard VM-50 firewall.

You can now deploy the VM-Series firewall directly from the Azure Security Center, which provides a consolidated view of the security posture of your Microsoft Azure workloads. This integration enables you to forward URL Filtering, Threat, and WildFire logs of high and critical severity that are generated on the firewall to Azure Security Center so that you can monitor security events from a single management console. When the firewall prevents an attack on your internet-facing web server and generates a threat log for a known vulnerability on an inbound request, for example, it forwards this log to Azure Security Center where you can directly review the security incident.

When bootstrapping the VM-Series firewall on Azure, you can now use Azure file storage (instead of a data disk) to store the bootstrap files. This change improves the bootstrapping workflow because it enables multiple virtual machines to simultaneously access the same bootstrap package.

To enable monitoring and alerts on the health and performance of the VM-Series firewall, you can now natively publish firewall metrics to Azure Application Insights. The integration with Azure Application Insights allows you to monitor custom PAN-OS metrics such as total number of active sessions or dataplane CPU utilization, in order to set alarms or trigger automation events.