Deep Dive: How does NSX Distributed Firewall work

This is a continuation of my posts on NSX features you can find other posts on the Deep Dive page.   My favorite feature of VMware NSX is the Distributed firewall.   It provides some long over due security features.  At one time I worked in an environment where we wanted to ensure that every type of traffic was filtered with a firewall.   This was an attempt to increase security.  We wanted to ensure that there was no east <-> west traffic between hosts; so everyone was in its own subnet.  Each virtual machine was deployed inside a /27 subnet alone.   Every communication required a trip to the firewall which was also serving as a router. It’s kinda hard if your stuff is stolen to get around Europe – even getting a låna-pengar.biz – lån och krediter in Sweden is not possible.

LunchThis model worked but made us very firewall centric.  Everything required multiple firewall changes.  Basic provisioning took weeks because of the constant need for more firewall changes.   In addition we wanted secondary controls so each host ran their own host based firewall as well.   This model caused a few major design constraints: you had to buy larger firewalls to handle all the routing and you had to take your firewall guys to lunch all the time to avoid mega rage.

Enter the distributed firewall

The distributed firewall applies firewall rules at the virtual machine kernel and network interface right above the guest OS.  This has a few advantages:

  • No one on the OS can change firewall rules
  • Only traffic that should be on the network is on the network everything else gets blocked before leaving the virtual machine (Think mega cost savings, and less garbage traffic)
  • You can inspect each packet before it gets to the network and take action (lots of third-party plugins will be able to do this)
  • You can scale out your firewalls capacity by adding more hosts in a modular fashion that matched your server growth

The firewall has a api for third-party solutions like virus scanners or IDS.   This allows them to be part of the data stream in real-time.

Components of Distributed firewall (DFW)

The DFW has a management plane, control plane and data plane which should be familiar to network admins.

  • Management Plane – is Done via vCenter plugin or API access to the NSX manager – This allows you to use any vCenter object as the source or destination (Datacenter, VM name, vNic etc..) It also allows you to define IP ranges for more traditional firewalls between IP’s
  • Control Plane – is done by the NSX manager it takes changes from vCenter and stores them in a central database and then pushes the rules down to each ESXi host.  (Database is /etc/vmware/vsfwd/vsipfw_ruleset.dat on each ESXi host)
  • Data Plane – ESXi hosts are the data plane doing the actual work of the firewall.  All firewall functions take place in kernel modules on the ESXi hosts.  Remember that enforcement is done locally and at the destination reducing the traffic on the wire.

Each vNIC get its own instance of DFW put into place and managed by a set of daemons called vsfwd.

How does it work?

Each firewall rule is created and applied via the NSX manager GUI or API.   When published it pushes all rules down to each ESXi host.  They create a file on disk which holds the all the firewall rules.   The ESXi host applies rules to the instance of DFW when a change in vCenter (remember management plane – like a new vNic vlan change etc..) happens the firewall rules are re-consulted.  IP-based rules require VMware tools to identify the IP address / addresses of the server.

How about vMotion?

Since the rules are applied to the virtual container they are moved with the host when vMotion is used, no effect.

How about HA events?

Rules are loaded off disk and applied to virtual machines.

What about if NSX Manager is not available?

Rules are loaded off disk. New systems will get the rule set that apply to them, for example if my new server is called Web-Machine12 and I have rules that are applied to all vm’s named Web-* then it will get them from disk.  This entourages the use of naming standards.

How about if I create a new virtual machines and it does not have any rules?

At the bottom is a default rule (some vote for allow all other deny all, I vote deny all) so you machine will have deny all.

Group and Policies

DFW has the concept of Security Groups (yep like it sounds) groups of similar systems, these can be hard-coded to specific entities or dynamic using regular expresses on any vCenter entity.   They also have security policies these are groups of like-minded rules to be processes in order.   So you define the scope of the rules in the Security Groups and define what is done in Security policies.  It can be a one to many reference on both sides.  (A security group can have many policies or a policy can have may groups) providing the ability to layer rules.

How do I track my firewall drops / accepts?

This is the first thing your firewall guys are going to ask for…  And I don’t like the answer right now.  They are logged to the ESXi hosts syslog.   So you need to centralize your host logs and do some searches to gather the firewalls into one place.   If you search your host based logs for “vsip_pkt” (In 6.1 they changed this to dfwpktlogs:) you will find the firewall drops / accepts.

 

4 Replies to “Deep Dive: How does NSX Distributed Firewall work”

  1. Hi
    I have one doubt whenever a new server segment is moved behind fw before adding rules a logical interface is created on fw.if routing is not there a static route to segment is added as running a dynamic routing not suggested on fw.but in nsx dfw no mention of logical interface creation and routing is mentioned how firewall identify packet flow could please explain

  2. Can you help to elaborate more about this, please ?

    How about vMotion?
    Since the rules are applied to the virtual container they are moved with the host when vMotion is used, no effect.

    Thanks.

    1. Thanks for reading. I believe this post has more details: http://blog.jgriffiths.org/?p=1277 The essential answer is that it depends on the apply to used. By default the apply to is the whole transport zone. So during a vMotion as long as the host is part of the transport zone the rules will be applied. The same is true for HA events. Essentially unless you force a virtual machine out of the transport zone the rules will be applied… Now if the apply to is a specific host then when you vMotion somewhere else the rules are no longer applied.

      Does that answer the question?

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