Part 2 - Preparing the Lab

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Introduction

Our lectures are designed for mastering both theoretical and practical aspects of Check Point products. Before moving forward, we need to build a lab environment. All further discussions have in mind the virtualization lab setup described below.

Attention: this document refers to R80.10 version. You can use exactly the same settings to run any of R81.x versions in the lab.

Virtual Lab

The virtual lab layout is presented on the diagram below.

It consists of five virtual machines

Security Management Server (SMS)
Security Gateway (SG)
Lab User PC
PC with SmartConsole[1]
Windows Server (Active Directory and IIS are enabled)

Virtualization platform

While we are using VMware Workstation 14 in our lab, you can also use ESXI or Virtual box as a virtualization platform.

Installation Software Images

To install and setup all Check Point machines you need R81.20 Check Point ISO file. It can be found here.

You will also need to install Windows Client (Windows 7 or higher) and Windows Server (2012 or higher) machines.

Note: Installation and setup of Windows machines are out of scope.

Hardware Requirements

Minimal Hardware requirements for Gaia R80.10 Open Server installation are listed in Check Point R81.20 Release Notes:

Although going below these requirements is definitely not recommended in the production, we can have some allowances in the lab.

These are recommended virtual machine parameters for our lab:

SMS: 6GB RAM, 4 CPU Cores, 80GB HDD
SG: 4GB RAM, 2 CPU Cores, 50GB HDD

You can chose your own RAM, CPU and HDD settings for Windows lab machines.

We believe the lab can be performed on a virtualization host with the following parameters:

4 cores CPU,
16BG RAM,
500GB HDD/SSD.

Network Layout

We recommend using the same IP addresses as shown on the lab diagram above. Make sure you use different VMnet segments for each of the lab networks.

All three Security Gateway network interfaces should be defined in the different network segments.

In case of VirtualBox based lab, chose Host-Only Ethernet Adapter.

[1] In case you are building this lab on your Windows PC, your virtualization host can take the role of SmartConsole Client.

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Authors and contributors

Author - Evgeniy Olkov‌, CTO at TS Solution.
Founded in 2010, the TS Solution is a fast growing Russian company, focused on integrating high-tech networking, security and server virtualization systems and technologies, along with maintenance and professional services.

Translation and editing - Valeri Loukine‌

Review and editing - Dameon Welch-Abernathy