Panorama is used to register the VM-Series firewall for NSX as the Palo Alto Networks NGFW service on the NSX Manager. Registering the Palo Alto Networks NGFW service on the NSX Manager allows the NSX Manager to deploy the VM-Series firewall for NSX on each ESXi host in the ESXi cluster.

Panorama serves as the central point of administration for the VM-Series firewalls running on NSX. When a new VM-Series firewall is deployed in NSX, it communicates with Panorama to obtain the license and receives its configuration/policies from Panorama. All configuration elements, policies, and dynamic address groups on the VM-Series firewalls can be centrally managed on Panorama using Device Groups and Template Stacks. The REST-based XML API integration in this solution, enables Panorama to synchronize with the NSX Manager and the VM-Series firewalls to allow the use of dynamic address groups and share context between the virtualized environment and security enforcement. For more information, see Policy Enforcement using Dynamic Address Groups.