The Panorama M-500 and M-100 appliances have several interfaces for communicating with other systems such as managed firewalls and the client systems of Panorama administrators. Panorama communicates with these systems to perform various services, including managing devices (firewalls, Log Collectors, and WildFire appliances and appliance clusters), collecting logs, communicating with Collector Groups, deploying software and content updates to devices, and providing administrative access to Panorama. By default, Panorama uses its management (MGT) interface for all these services. However, you can improve security by reserving the MGT interface for administrative access and dedicating separate interfaces for the other services. In a large-scale network with multiple subnetworks and heavy log traffic, using multiple interfaces for device management and log collection also enables network segmentation and load balancing (see Configure Panorama to Use Multiple Interfaces).

When assigning Panorama services to various interfaces, keep in mind that only the MGT interface allows administrative access to Panorama for configuration and monitoring tasks. You can assign any interface to the other services when you Perform Initial Configuration of the M-Series Appliance. The M-100 and M-500 Appliance Hardware Reference Guides explain where to attach cables for the interfaces. The M-100 appliance support 1Gbps throughput on all its interfaces: MGT, Eth1, Eth2, and Eth3. In addition to these interfaces, the M-500 appliance supports 10Gbps throughput on its Eth4 and Eth5 interfaces.