Manually Integrate the VM-Series with a Gateway Load Balancer

Set up the security VPC. See the AWS documentation for more information about creating your security VPC.
Create two subnets—one for management and one for data.
Create two security groups—one for firewall management and one for data.
The management subnet security groups should allow https and ssh for management access.
Ensure that the security group(s) in your data VPC allows GENEVE-encapsulated packets (UDP port 6081).
If your deployment includes a transit gateway and traffic that will move between VPCs, you must enable appliance mode on security VPC attachment.
The target group of the GWLB cannot use HTTP for health checks because the VM-Series firewall does not allow access with an unsecured protocol. Instead, use another protocol such as HTTPS or TCP.
Launch the VM-Series firewall.
On the EC2 Dashboard, click
Launch Instance
.
Select the VM-Series AMI. To get the AMI, see Obtain the AMI.
Launch the VM-Series firewall on an EC2 instance.
Choose the
EC2 instance type
for allocating the resources required for the firewall, and click
Next
. See VM-Series System Requirements, for resource requirements.
Select the security VPC.
Select the data subnet to attach to eth0.
Select
Launch as an EBS-optimized instance
.
Add another network interface for eth1 to act as the management interface after the interface swap. Swapping interfaces requires a minimum of two ENIs (eth0 and eth1).
Expand the Network Interfaces section and click

Add Device

to add another network interface.

Make sure that your VPC has more than one subnet so that you can add additional ENIs at launch.

If you launch the firewall with only one ENI:

The interface swap command will cause the firewall to boot into maintenance mode.
You must reboot the firewall when you add the second ENI.

Expand the Advanced Details section and in the

User data

field enter as text to perform the interface swap during launch.

mgmt-interface-swap=enable

plugin-op-commands=aws-gwlb-inspect:enable

If you set the target type to the IP address of a specific interface on the VM-Series firewall, you do not need to enable management interface swap.


Accept the default
Storage
settings. The firewall uses volume type SSD (gp2).
If prompted, select an appropriate
SSD
option for your setup.
(
Optional
)
Tagging
. Add one or more tags to create your own metadata to identify and group the VM-Series firewall. For example, add a
Name
tag with a
Value
that helps you remember that the ENI interfaces have been swapped on this VM-Series firewall.
Select the data
Security Group
for eth0 (data interface). Enable traffic on UDP port 6081.
If you enable health checks to the firewall, you cannot use HTTP. Instead, use another protocol such as HTTPS or TCP.
Select
Review and Launch
. Review that your selections are accurate and click
Launch
.
Select an existing key pair or create a new one, and acknowledge the key disclaimer.
This key pair is required for first time access to the firewall. It is also required to access the firewall in maintenance mode.
Download and save the private key to a safe location; the file extension is
.pem
. You cannot regenerate this key, if lost.
It takes 5-7 minutes to launch the VM-Series firewall. You can view the progress on the EC2 Dashboard.When the process completes, the VM-Series firewall displays on the
Instances
page of the EC2 Dashboard.
Attach the management security group to eth1 (management interface). Allow ssh and https. See the AWS Documentation for more information.
Create and assign an Elastic IP address (EIP) to the ENI used for management access (eth1) to the firewall.
Select
Elastic IPs
and click
Allocate New Address
.
Select
EC2-VPC
and click
Yes, Allocate
.
Select the newly allocated EIP and click
Associate Address
.
Select the
Network Interface
and the
Private IP address
associated with the management interface and click
Yes, Associate
.
Configure a new administrative password for the firewall.
On the VM-Series firewall CLI, you must configure a unique administrative password before you can access the web interface of the firewall. To log in to the CLI, you require the private key that you used to launch the firewall.
Use the EIP to SSH into the Command Line Interface (CLI) of the VM-Series firewall. You will need the private key that you used or created above and using the user name
admin
to access the CLI.
If you are using PuTTY for SSH access, you must convert the .pem format to a .ppk format. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/putty.html
Enter the following command to log in to the firewall:
ssh-i
<private_key.pem>
admin@
<public-ip_address>
Configure a new password, using the following command and follow the onscreen prompts:
configure
set mgt-config users admin password
If you have a BYOL that needs to be activated, set the DNS server IP address so that the firewall can aceess the Palo Alto Networks licensing server. Enter the following command to set the DNS server IP address:
set deviceconfig system dns-setting servers primary
<ip_address>
Commit your changes with the command:
commit
Terminate the SSH session.
Configure the dataplane network interface as a Layer 3 interface on the firewall.
On the application servers within the VPC, define the dataplane network interface of the firewall as the default gateway.
Using a secure connection (https) from your web browser, log in using the EIP address and password you assigned during initial configuration (https://<Elastic_IP address>). You will see a certificate warning; that is okay. Continue to the web page.
Select
Network
Interfaces
Ethernet
.
Click the link for
ethernet 1/1
and configure as follows:
Interface Type
:
Layer3
On the
Config
tab, assign the interface to the default router.
On the
Config
tab, expand the
Security Zone
drop-down and select
New Zone
. Define a new zone and then click
OK
.
On the
IPv4
tab, select
DHCP Client
.
If using DHCP, select
DHCP Client
; the private IP address that you assigned to the ENI in the AWS management console will be automatically acquired.
On the Advanced tab, create a management profile to allow health checks to be received by the firewall.
Click
Commit
. Verify that the link state for the interface is up.
Create security policies to allow/deny traffic.
Because the VM-Series treats traffic as intrazone when integrated with a GWLB, a default intrazone rule allows all traffic. It is a best practice to override the default intrazone rule with a deny action for traffic that does not match any of your other security policy rules.
Select
Policies
Security
on the web interface of the firewall.
Click
Add
, and specify the security zones, applications and logging options that you would like to execute to restrict and audit traffic traversing through the network.
Commit
the changes on the firewall.