To ease the operational burden of managing the configuration of your large-scale firewall deployment, Palo Alto Networks provides different firewall management options to best suit your deployment scenario.

If your large-scale firewall deployment is composed of one or very few Panorama management servers, you can deploy an M-600, M-700 appliance, or Panorama virtual appliance on ESXi to manage up to 5,000 firewalls, or Panorama virtual appliance to manage up to 2,500 firewalls, to leverage all Panorama capabilities from a single Panorama management server. The Increased Device Management Capacity for M-Series and Panorama Virtual Appliance is ideal for vertically scaled deployments where you manage a large number of firewalls from a single Panorama management server rather than deploying multiple Panorama management servers to manage fewer firewalls.

If your large-scale firewall deployment is composed of multiple Panorama management servers with similar configurations, the Panorama Interconnect plugin allows you to manage multiple Panorama Nodes from a single Panorama Controller. This plugin simplifies the deployment and operational management of large scale firewall deployments because you can centrally manage policy and configuration from a Panorama Controller. From the Panorama Controller, the device group and template stack configuration is synchronized to the Panorama Nodes and pushed to managed devices. The Panorama Interconnect plugin is ideal for horizontally-scaled firewall deployments with multiple distributed Panorama management servers.