Templates and Template Stacks
Table of Contents
Templates and Template Stacks
Overview of template and template stack configuration
functionality.
You use templates and template stacks to configure the
settings that enable firewalls to operate on the network. Templates
are the basic building blocks you use to configure the Network and Device tabs
on Panorama™. You can use templates to define interface and zone
configurations, to manage the server profiles for logging and syslog
access, or to define VPN configurations. Template stacks give you
the ability to layer multiple templates and create a combined configuration.
Template stacks simplify management because they allow you to define
a common base configuration for all devices attached to the template
stack and they give you the ability to layer templates to create
a combined configuration. This enables you to define templates with
location- or function-specific settings and then stack the templates
in descending order of priority so that firewalls inherit the settings
based on the order of the templates in the stack.
Both templates and template stacks support variables. Variables
allow you to create placeholder objects with their value specified
in the template or template stack based on your configuration needs.
Create a template or template stack variable to replace IP addresses,
Group IDs, and interfaces in your configurations. Template variables
are inherited by the template stack and you can override them to
create a template stack variable. However, templates do not inherit
variables defined in the template stack. When a variable is defined
in the template or template stack and pushed to the firewall, the
value defined for the variable is displayed on the firewall.
Use templates to accommodate firewalls that have unique settings.
Alternatively, you can push a broader, common base configuration
and then override certain pushed settings with firewall-specific
values on individual firewalls. When you override a setting on the
firewall, the firewall saves that setting to its local configuration and
Panorama no longer manages the setting. To restore template values
after you override them, use Panorama to force the template or template
stack configuration onto the firewall. For example, after you define
a common NTP server in a template and override the NTP server configuration
on a firewall to accommodate a local time zone, you can later revert
to the NTP server defined in the template.
When defining a template stack, consider assigning firewalls
that are the same hardware model and require access to similar network
resources, such as gateways and syslog servers. This enables you
to avoid the redundancy of adding every setting to every template
stack. The following figure illustrates an example configuration
in which you assign data center firewalls in the Asia-Pacific (APAC)
region to a stack with global settings, one template with APAC-specific
settings, and one template with data center-specific settings. To
manage firewalls in an APAC branch office, you can then re-use the
global and APAC-specific templates by adding them to another stack
that includes a template with branch-specific settings. Templates
in a stack have a configurable priority order that ensures Panorama
pushes only one value for any duplicate setting. Panorama evaluates
the templates listed in a stack configuration from top to bottom
with higher templates having priority. The following figure illustrates
a data center stack in which the data center template has a higher
priority than the global template: Panorama pushes the idle timeout
value from the data center template and ignores the value from the
global template.
You cannot use templates or template stacks to set firewall modes:
virtual private network (VPN) mode, multiple virtual systems (multi-vsys)
mode, or operational modes (normal or FIPS-CC mode). For details,
see Template
Capabilities and Exceptions. However, you can assign firewalls
that have non-matching modes to the same template or stack. In such
cases, Panorama pushes mode-specific settings only to firewalls
that support those modes. As an exception, you can configure Panorama
to push the settings of the default vsys in a template to firewalls
that don’t support virtual systems or that don’t have any virtual
systems configured.
For the relevant procedures, see Manage
Templates and Template Stacks.