VM-Series Deployment Guide
    : Enable Session Resiliency on VM-Series for GCP
    Focus
    Download PDF
    Focus
    1. Home
    2. VM-Series
    3. VM-Series Deployment Guide
    4. Set Up the VM-Series Firewall on Google Cloud Platform
    5. Deploy the VM-Series Firewall on Google Cloud Platform
    6. Enable Session Resiliency on VM-Series for GCP
    Download PDF

    VM-Series Deployment Guide

    Enable Session Resiliency on VM-Series for GCP

    Table of Contents

    Enable Session Resiliency on VM-Series for GCP

    Learn how to enable session resiliency on your VM-Series firewall deployed in GCP.
    Session resiliency allows the VM-Series firewall to maintain session continuity during a failure event. The GCP Network Load Balancer (NLB) can detect and deregister unhealthy VM-Series firewalls deployed in a horizontally scalable cluster behind it. With session resiliency enabled, the NLB rehashes existing traffic sessions flowing toward an unhealthy VM-Series and redirects the traffic to a healthy VM-Series firewall. This allows a VM-Series firewall cluster to continue inspecting long-lived application sessions, even in the case of VM-Series appliance failures.
    Traffic inspection of the rehashed traffic flows is Layer 4 only. The VM-Series firewall inspects traffic in new sessions up to Layer 7.
    To maintain sessions failing over to healthy VM-Series firewalls, you must deploy a Standard-tier
    Memorystore for Redis
     cache accessible to your VM-Series firewalls. The Redis cache maintains session information. When your load balancer detects an unhealthy VM-Series firewall, the load balancer rebalances traffic to a healthy VM-Series firewall. The healthy VM-Series firewall accesses the Redis cache for session information and continues to inspect and forward the existing traffic.
    Your load balancer must meet the following requirements to support session resiliency.
    • Your load balancer must be an Internal pass-through Network Load Balancer
    • You must set your load balancer connection persistence on unhealthy nodes to
      NEVER_PERSIST.
    Your Memorystore for Redis instance must meet the following requirements to support session resiliency on the VM-Series firewall.
    • Standard tier
    • Deploy the Redis cache in the same region and zone as your VM-Series firewall instances.
    • From the Network drop-down, select the VPC network associated with the VM-Series firewall management interface.
    • Enable
      AUTH
       to limit access to only trusted users.
    • Enable
      In-Transit Encryption
       to encrypt connections to Redis cache using TLS.
    When sizing your Memorystore for Redis, use the following guidelines.
    • Base the size of Redis cache on the maximum number of sessions supported by your VM-Series firewall instance. See
      Maximum Limits Based on Tier and Memory
       to the maximum sessions for your firewall.
    • When session resiliency is enabled, the maximum number of sessions is capped at 70% of the amount listed in the link above. For example, if your firewall supports up to 10,000,000 sessions, the maximum is 7,000,000 with session resiliency.
    • Each redis entry per session uses approximately 128 bytes. Therefore, one VM-Series firewall that supports 10,000,000 sessions requires approximately 1.3 GB of storage. And a cluster of 10 VM-Series firewalls requires at least 13 GB.
    • Use the following formula to calculate the redis requirements.
      (128 x <number of sessions>) x 10
      -9
      = require redis cache size per firewall
    Session resiliency can't be enabled on existing VM-Series firewall instances; only on newly deployed instances.
    Enable session resiliency on the VM-Series firewall by passing the configuration as part of a bootstrapping init-cfg.txt file or in the user data field.
    Bootstrap Parameter
    Description
    op-command-modes=mgmt-interface-swap
    Allows you to swap the management interface (MGT) with the dataplane interface (ethernet 1/1) when deploying the firewall. For details, see Management Interface Swap for Google Cloud Platform Load Balancing.
    plugin-op-commands=set-sess-ress:True
    Enables session resiliency.
    redis-endpoint=
    Provide the IP address or FQDN and port of your Redis endpoint.
    redis-auth=
    Optional
     The auth code your VM-Series firewall uses to connect with the Redis endpoint.
    redis-certificate=
    Optional
    The root CA certificate string used to connect to the Redis endpoint. The certificate must be a base64-encoded string using utf-8 encoding.
    1. Deploy your Redis cache.
    2. op-command-modes=mgmt-interface-swap
plugin-op-commands=set-sess-ress:True
redis-endpoint=<redis-IP-address:port>
redis-auth=<redis-auth-code>
redis-certificate=
    4. Log in to the firewall.
    5. Create an address object for the load balancer front-end IP address.
      1. Select
        Objects
        Address
        and click
        Add
        .
      2. Enter a descriptive
        Name
        .
      3. Set the Type to IP Netmask and enter the load balancer front-end IP address.
      4. Click
        OK
        .
    6. Create a loopback interface to send health check packets to the load balancer.
      1. Select
        Networking
        Interfaces
        Loopback
         and click
        Add
        .
      2. Enter a descriptive
        Name
        .
      3. On the
        Config
         tab, set the
        Virtual Router
         to default and the
        Security Zone
         to your trust zone.
      4. On the
        IPv4
         tab, add the address object you created previously.
      5. Click
        OK
        .
    7. Create a management profile.
      1. Select
        Network
        Network Profiles
        Interface Mgmt
         and click
        Add
        .
      2. Enable Ping, SSH, HTTPS, and SNMP.
        Don’t enable HTTP or Telnet because those protocols transmit in cleartext and therefore aren’t secure.
      3. Click
        OK
        .
    8. Add your management profile to your loopback interface.
      1. Select
        Network
        Interfaces
        , select your loopback interface.
      2. Select
        Advanced
        Other
         info and select the Interface Management Profile you just added.
      3. Click
        OK
        .
    9. Commit
       your changes.

    Recommended For You

    © 2024 Palo Alto Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.