Bootstrapping a firewall

Bootstrapping the firewall pushes a pre-prepared configuration into a newly deployed firewall while it is being installed so it is immediately operational.

This can shave off valuable time when recovering from a failure or ramping up a deployment to deal with an increased load on the infrastructure.

To enable bootstrapping, you first need to create storage that can be accessed by the firewall while it is being deployed. For an ESXi deployment, for example, you can create a root folder on your workstation that contains the required subfolders (see Creating a bootstrap file share for the correct folder structure), put the folder into an ISO file (using your preferred ISO burner tool), and upload the ISO to an accessible VMFS/NFS file share so it can be loaded as a disk image when the firewall is deployed.

Cloud deployments require a storage account so you can store the few files that will be used during the bootstrapping phase.

From the Azure...