The McAfee channel team has recently been approached with some follow up questions surrounding the McAfee Firewall Enterprise V8 announcement; specifically regarding the performance and functionality differences between Firewall Appliance and Firewall Virtual Appliance. Please see below for the captured Q&A.
1. Is there any difference, from a functionality perspective, between the Firewall Enterprise Appliance and Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance?
Both are using the same features and functionality, but the appliances protect your physical infrastructure and network elements, and the Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance protects any virtual networks or virtual servers running inside a VMware ESX environment.
2. How many Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliances can be hosted with a Standard license?
Our Standard (FV5) solution is licensed per ESX server, so purchasing a single Standard license allows installation on a single ESX server. This single Standard license will protect up to 5 virtual servers that are running inside that same ESX server.
3. How many Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliances can be hosted with an Unlimited license?
Our Unlimited (FVU) solution is licensed per ESX server, so purchasing a single Unlimited license allows installation on a single ESX server. This single Unlimited license will protect an unlimited number of virtual servers that are running inside that same ESX server. Clearly, the ability for an ESX server to support a handful of virtual servers or more depends on the physical hardware chosen for the host machine.
4. How many cores does each Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance support?
The Standard license is limited to 1 core, but the Unlimited license will support up to 4 cores.
5. Which is the estimated maximum performance of one Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance with one core?
|
Performance |
Virtual Appliance |
| Packet filtering throughput (TCP) | 275 Mbps* |
| Stateful throughput | 250 Mbps* |
| Concurrent connections | 100,000* |
| Application filtering throughput | 230 Mbps* |
| IPSec VPN throughput |
160 Mbps* |
* Actual performance depends on underlying hardware
6. Supportability of vSphere 4 ESX and ESXi, Vmotion, HAS and DRS?
We do not currently support VMotion, or VMware’s Fault Tolerance. We are licensed per ESX server and sharing resources between ESX servers via DRS does not align with our licensing schema plus DRS works with VMotion, which is not supported.
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You will learn:
- What levels of control you should expect—and at what cost
- The importance of being able to visualize your network
users & applications
- How you can have a simple, centralized rules environment
- That a firewall can be integrated, flexible, and affordable
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