Hi,
You don't mention if you have Appliance or Open servers running for your cluster. Check Point has a performance sizing utilty (not supported on Open servers and some appliances) which can assist you in decision of enabling IPS blade.
https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solut...
From the description:
The cpsizeme
is a lightweight shell script that produces a detailed performance report of Check Point Security Gateway. This script measures the ongoing resource utilization on Security Gateway during the given time period (refer to "Running cpsizeme
" section). During this period, the script gathers information about CPU, memory consumption, throughput and few other important performance parameters.
This cpsizeme
output and report can assist in improving the sizing accuracy in any one of the following scenarios:
- Replacing the current Security Gateway appliance/server with a new one.
- Future growth and planning ahead.
- Enabling more security Software Blades on the current Security Gateway.
- Troubleshoot performance issues on the Security Gateway
IPS can have from low to high performance impact on your gateways (depending on your tuning and number of enabled protections) so if your gateways are already saturated you wil not have much left for growth in resouce utilization.