What do you like best about the product?
The VM-series firewalls worked as intended, and we were able to automate the installation of them as well. I liked the level of integration there was with ansible for configuring the firewall settings. This was very useful when running throughput testing across a variety of firewall configurations.
What do you dislike about the product?
The licensing was complicated, and this created difficulties when trying to automate the installation of the firewalls. It was challenging to try to automate VM-series firewalls using Terraform, especially for VMWare, because of the need to attach an additional CD with the pre-configuration settings.
Also, the VM-series seems to be well-optimized for VMWare, but not really for KVM-based hypervisors like Nutanix. We did extensive throughput testing, comparing the hypervisors, and the firewall on VMWare performed better.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Being able to virtualize the firewall helped us be more flexible with our hardware costs. We could purchase virtual infrastructure instead of dedicated firewall hardware.