How to create firewall rules

Overview

VMware Cloud Director provides a fully featured layer 3 firewall to control transit from inside to outside security boundaries, and within the various VDC networks you create.

When you specify networks or IP addresses, you can use:

  • An individual IP address

  • IP ranges separated by a dash (-)

  • A CIDR, for example, 192.168.2.0/24

  • The keywords internal, external or any

Note

For security reasons, you should ensure that the firewall is always enabled.

Creating firewall rules

To create a firewall rule:

  1. In the VMware Cloud Director Virtual Data Center dashboard, select the VDC that contains the edge gateway in which you want to create the firewall rules.

  2. In the left navigation panel, under Networking, select Edges.

    Edges menu option in VMware Cloud Director

  3. On the Edge Gateways page, select the edge that you want to configure and click Services.

    Configure Services button

  4. On the Edge Gateway page, select the Firewall tab.

    Firewall tab

  5. On the Firewall Rules page, click the + button to add a new row to the firewall rules table.

    Add firewall button

  6. In the row for your new rule, select the Name field and enter a name for the rule.

    New firewall rule

    Note

    When you first create a rule, it's set to Any, Any, Any, Accept, as shown above. We strongly advise that you do not use these default settings for any firewall rule as this allows all traffic through.

  7. Select the Source and Destination fields and specify the source and destination addresses for the firewall rule.

    • To specify an IP address or range, click IP and enter the appropriate Value. When you're done, click Keep.

      Source IP Address dialog box

    • To specify a group of VMs or IP addresses, click + and select the desired objects. When you're done, click Keep.

      Select objects dialog box

    • If you're likely to reuse a the same group of source or destination IP addresses in multiple rules, select the Grouping Objects tab and click + to create an IP set. You can then select this IP set in the Select objects dialog box.

      New IP Set dialog box

  8. Select the Service field and click +.

  9. In the Add Service dialog box, specify the Protocol, Source Port and Destination Port for the rule. When you're done, click Keep.

    Add Service dialog box

  10. Select the Action field, and from the list select whether the rule is an Accept or Deny rule.

  11. If you have a syslog server configured, select the Enable logging check box.

    For more information about syslog servers, see How to access syslog data for your edge gateway.

  12. Click Save changes.

    Save changes link on Firewall tab

Example

A common use case for a firewall rule is to allow SSH through from the internet. The following example uses allocated public IP addresses.

  • For VDCs in the Assured OFFICIAL security domain, you're assigned five public IP addresses

  • For VDCs in the Elevated OFFICIAL security domain, you're assigned three PSN IP addresses

In the example below, the source is any (any IP address within the VDC). The source port is also any. The destination is a public IP address and the destination port is 443 for HTTPS.

Firewall rule to allow SSH through from the internet

Next steps

In this article you've learned how to create firewall rules. For other edge gateway configuration tasks, see:

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