vCenter Firewall Service. Is Vcenter firewall service good enough? How do I get the maximum benefits out of this tool? These questions are very common among VMware administrators. Let us look at some of these issues and try to answer them.
vCenter firewall service features
vCenter firewall service provides several important features such as blocking incoming connections, restricting traffic between hosts and networks, and controlling data flow between virtual machines. It also has built-in tools such as monitoring, alerting, reporting, and policy management. Each feature mentioned above helps to enhance the overall security of your infrastructure.
Automatically detects
vCenter firewall service automatically detects the IP address, port number, and protocol of the incoming connection. You can configure the firewall rules to allow or deny traffic for certain IP addresses, certain ports and specific protocols. The process is very simple as it does not require expert knowledge.
Easy to create
The rules, templates, and policies are very easy to create. It requires little or no effort from your side. You can create these rules and policies manually or use an automated approach. This tool has a logging feature that can be used to keep a track of several things such as successful connections, blocked traffic, errors, etc.
Vcenter firewall service is available on all hypervisor platforms like ESXi and vCenter Server. It is compatible with other VMware products such as vRealize Operations Manager and vRealize Log Insight. The monitoring feature helps you gather performance data from various sources such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), vCenter Server, vRealize Operations Manager, etc.
Intuitive user interface
One of the best things about this tool is that it has a very intuitive user interface. It makes it very easy for users to navigate through the different features of this product which helps in better management of your infrastructure.
Policy-based management
The policy-based management in the Vcenter firewall service allows you to define what kind of traffic is allowed or denied for certain virtual machines or even for the specific network interface card (NIC). This feature enables you to set up rules very easily that can be applied across different virtual machines or multiple NICs at once with a single click.
Powerful reporting capabilities
With the vCenter firewall service, you get powerful reporting capabilities which can help you keep track of many things such as blocked traffic/connections, successful connections/transfers, and also error messages for each rule/policy/template.
This will help you reduce the number of false positives and do a better job when it comes to troubleshooting.
How To Configure Vcenter Firewall Service?
Configuring Vcenter firewall service is a very simple process that does not require any expert knowledge of firewall rules and policies. As mentioned earlier, you can create rules manually or use an automated approach. Let us look into each of them individually.
Automated Approach:
If you want to get the maximum benefits out of this tool, then you should automate the whole process of creating and managing firewall rules, templates, policies, etc. This is pretty easy to do as Vcenter firewall provides a number of easy-to-use interfaces.
Moreover, can automate the whole process like vSphere Client, vSphere Web Client, PowerCLI/ESXCLI and RESTful APIs. You can also use other third-party tools like VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to achieve this automation.
Manual Approach:
In case you do not want to use any automation tools, then you can still manage your firewall rules manually. It is not advisable for large environments but suitable for small infrastructures where there are fewer virtual machines and hosts involved. You can use a web browser or vSphere client to create, manage and apply firewall rules manually.