topic VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances in General Topics

VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

HeikoAnkenbrand — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 09:47:35 GMT

Recently, I heard through informal discussions among German SEs that using Check Point 9300 and 9400 appliances with VSX may not be the most optimal setup. The reason seems to be tied to the way energy-efficient cores and performance cores are distributed asynchronously within these platforms.

It is easy to imagine that such a mixed-core architecture could potentially lead to imbalances in performance when running demanding VSX environments. As VSX relies heavily on predictable CPU behavior across virtual systems, heterogeneous cores may introduce unexpected issues in processing consistency, latency, or throughput.

Appliance	Performance cores	Efficient cores	Cores / Virtual cores
9300	6	4	10 / 16
9400	6	8	14 / 20

Questions:

Has Check Point made any official statement regarding this specific scenario?
Are there any known limitations or best practices for running VSX on 9300/9400 appliances with this CPU architecture?
What would be the recommended configuration to ensure stable and reliable operation in production environments?

Re: VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

Chris_Atkinson — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 11:55:41 GMT

There is only some limited / inconclusive discussion from other community members here to my knowledge:

https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/General-Topics/VSX-UPPAK-issues/m-p/258287

Re: VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

HeikoAnkenbrand — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 09:15:49 GMT

Thanks for the info, @Chris_Atkinson.

My question is whether it makes sense to use the 9300/9400 in a VSX environment.

The problem is that when I assign, for example, 3 CoreXL instances to a virtual system via SmartConsole, it can happen that one E-core and two P-cores are used. This is highly suboptimal.

That’s why I’ve always statically assigned either E-cores or P-cores to the virtual systems. That works fine.

The only issue is that when it happens automatically, it leads to performance problems.

Re: VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

Chris_Atkinson — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 15:03:26 GMT

Understood but given the use case can be anything from MDPS like deployments to those much more complex / advanced it might be more subjective.

Re: VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

HeikoAnkenbrand — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:56:14 GMT

Is there an official statement from Check Point on this topic, or should I contact the German Partner SEs?

Re: VSX on Check Point 9300/9400 Appliances

PhoneBoy — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:09:45 GMT

Your best bet is to reach out to your local Check Point office, yes.