NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) is the most popular feature of NSX which enables microsegmenation of networks with vNIC level firewalls in hypervisor. For real technical deep dive into the feature I recommend reading Wade Holmes free e-book available here.

vCloud Director 8.20 provides this feature to tenants with brand new HTML5 UI and API. It is managed at Org VDC level from Manage Firewall link. This opens new tab with the new user interface.

Firewall Comparison

vCloud Director now offers three different firewalls types for tenants, which might be confusing. So let me quickly compare them.

The picture above shows two Org VDCs each with different network topologies. Org VDC 1 is using Org VDC Edge Gateway that provides firewalling as well as other networking services (load balancing, VPNs, NAT, routing, etc.). It has also brand new UI and Network API. Firewalling at this level is enforced only on packets routed through the Edge Gateway.

One level below we see vApps with vApp Edges. These provide routing, firewalling and NAT between routed vApp Network and Org VDC network. There is no change in firewall capability of vApp Edge in vCloud Director 8.20 and old flash UI and vCloud API can be used for its configuration. Firewalling at vApp Edge level is enforced only on packets routed between Org VDC and vApp networks.

Distributed firewall is applied at the vNIC level of virtual machines. It means it can inspect every packet and frame coming and leaving VM and is therefore completely independent from the network topology and can be used for microsegmentation of layer 2 network. Both layer 3 and layer 2 rules can be created.

Obviously all three firewall types can be combined and used together.

Managing Access to Distributed Firewall

There are four new access rights related to DFW in vCloud Director.

Manage Firewall

Configure Distributed Firewall Rules

View Distributed Firewall Rules

Enable / Disable Distributed Firewall

The last right is by default available only to system administrators, therefore the provider can control which tenant can and cannot use DFW and it can thus be offered as a value added service. The provider can either enable DFW selectively for specific Org VDCs or alternatively grant Enable/Disable Distributed Firewall right to a specific organization via API. The tenant can enable DFW by himself.

Distributed Firewall under the Hood

Each tenant is given a section in the NSX firewall table and can only apply rules to VMs and Edge Gateways in his domain. There is one section for each Org VDC that has DFW enabled and it is created always on top.

Edit 3/14/2017: In fact it is possible to create the section at the bottom just above the default section. This allows provider to create its own section on the top which will be always enforced first. The use case for this could be service network.

To force creation of the section at the bottom the firewall must be enabled with API call with ?append=true at the end.

Example:

POST https://vcloud.fojta.com/network/firewall/vdc/be0f2baa-d36f-47f0-8443-3c5cac231ba5?append=true

As tenants could have overlapping IPs all rules in the section are scoped to a security group with dynamic membership of tenant Org VDC resource pools and thus will be applied only to VMs in the Org VDC.

Tenants can create layer 3 (IP based) or layer 2 (MAC based) rules while using the following objects when defining them:

IP address, IP/MAC sets

Virtual Machine

Org VDC Network

Org VDC

Note that using L3 non-IP based rules requires NSX to learn IP address(es) of the guest VM. One of the following mechanism must be enabled:

VMware Tools installed in guest VM

DHCP Snooping IP Detection Type

ARP Snooping IP Detection Type

IP Detection Type is configured in NSX at Cluster Level in Host Preparation tab.

Scope for each rule can be defined in Applied To column. As mentioned before by default it is set to the Org VDC, however tenant can further limit the scope of the rule to a particular VM, or Org VDC network (note that vApp network cannot be used). It is also possible to apply the rule to Org VDC Edge Gateway, in such case the rule is actually created and enforced on the Edge Gateway as pre-rule which has precedence over all other firewall rules defined at that Edge Gateway.

Tenant can enable logging of a specific firewall rule with API by editing <rule … logged=”true|false”> element. NSX then logs the first session packet matching the rule to ESXi host log with tenant specific tag (Org VDC UUID subset string). The provider can then filter such logs and forward them to tenants with its own syslog solution.