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Palo Alto VPN Speedtests

Palo Alto VPN Speedtests
Once more some throughput tests, this time the Palo Alto Networks firewalls site-to-site IPsec VPN. Similar to my VPN speedtests for the FortiGate firewall, I set up a small lab with two PA-200 firewalls and tested the bandwidth of different IPsec phase 2 algorithms. Compared to the official data sheet information from Palo Alto that state an IPsec VPN throughput of 50 Mbps, the results are really astonishing.

(This is one of many VPN tutorials on my blog. Have a look at this full list.).)

Lab

My lab consists of two PA-200 firewalls with PAN-OS 7.1.1 installed. They were plugged into a simple layer 2 switch. The two notebooks were booted with Knoppix 7.6.1 and used Iperf version 2.0.5.
Palo Alto VPN Speedtests Labor
I first tested the throughput with only routing and then built the VPN. After every test I changed the phase 2 parameters. The Iperf tests ran in both directions. Here are some configuration screenshots:
Of course I verified the correct IPsec algorithms after each change, such as here:

Test Results

Here are the results, each Tx/Rx in Mbps:
Palo Alto VPN SpeedtestsNo VPN TxNo VPN Rx3des-sha1-group2Tx3des-sha1-group2Rxaes128-sha1-group5 Txaes128-sha1-group5 Rxaes256-sha256-group14 Txaes256-sha256-group14 Rxaes256-sha512-g…aes256-sha512-g…02505007501000MBit/s
foobarNo VPN TxNo VPN Rx3des-sha1-group2 Tx3des-sha1-group2 Rxaes128-sha1-group5 Txaes128-sha1-group5 Rxaes256-sha256-group14 Txaes256-sha256-group14 Rxaes256-sha512-group20 Txaes256-sha512-group20 Rx
blubb937934198228215271205254212260
And the raw values:
  • Only routing: 937/934
  • esp-3des-sha1-group2-1h: 198/228
  • esp-aes128-sha1-group5-1h: 215/271
  • esp-aes256-sha256-group14-1h: 205/254
  • esp-aes256-sha512-group20-1h: 212/260
That is: All tests are around 200 Mbps. The Tx direction is always a bit slower, which might be a test failure. The AES algorithms are faster than the old 3DES cipher. This might be related to the fact that AES is made to be fast in software and in hardware.
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