The management and data plane

There are two main planes that make up a firewall, the data plane and the management plane, which are physical or logical boards that perform specific functions. All platforms have a management plane. Larger platforms like the PA-5200 have an additional control plane and two to three data planes, and the largest platforms have replaceable hardware blades (line cards) that have up to three data plane equivalents per line card and can hold up to 10 line cards. Smaller platforms like the PA-220 only have one hardware board that virtually splits up responsibilities among its CPU cores.

The management plane is where all administrative tasks happen. It serves the web interfaces used by the system to allow configuration, provide URL filtering block pages, and serve the client VPN portal. It performs cloud lookups for URL filtering and DNS security, and downloads and installs content updates onto the data plane. It also performs the logic part of routing...