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Palo Alto PA-VM#

Palo Alto PA-VM virtualized firewall is identified with vr-pan or vr-paloalto_panos kind in the topology file. It is built using boxen project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

vr-pan nodes launched with containerlab come up pre-provisioned with SSH, and HTTPS services enabled.

Managing vr-pan nodes#

Note

Containers with Palo Alto PA-VM inside will take ~8min to fully boot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Palo Alto PA-VM node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running vr-pan container: 

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

to connect to the Palo Alto PA-VM CLI 

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

HTTPS server is running over port 443 -- connect with any browser normally.

Info

Default user credentials: admin:Admin@123

Interfaces mapping#

vr-pan container supports up to 24 interfaces (plus mgmt) and uses the following mapping rules:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to first data port of PAN VM
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interface

When containerlab launches vr-pan node, it will assign IPv4/6 address to the mgmt interface. These addresses can be used to reach management plane of the router.

Data interfaces eth1+ need to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI/management protocols.

Info

Interfaces will not show up in the cli (show interfaces all) until some configuration is made to the interface!

Features and options#

Node configuration#

vr-pan nodes come up with a basic configuration where only admin user and management interface is provisioned.

User defined config#

It is possible to make vr-pan nodes to boot up with a user-defined config instead of a built-in one. With a startup-config property a user sets the path to the config file that will be mounted to a container and used as a startup config:

name: lab
topology:
  nodes:
    ceos:
      kind: vr-paloalto_panos
      startup-config: myconfig.conf