How to create firewall rules

Overview

vCloud 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

NAT rules only work if the firewall is enabled. For security reasons, you should ensure that the firewall is always enabled.

Creating firewall rules

To create a firewall rule:

  1. In the vCloud Director Virtual Datacenters dashboard, select the VDC that contains the edge gateway in which you to create the firewall rules.

  2. In the left navigation panel, click Edges.

    Edges menu option in vCloud Director

  3. Select the edge that you want to configure and click Configure Services.

    Configure Services button

  4. Select the Firewall tab.

    Firewall tab

  5. Click the + button to add a new row to the firewall rules table.

    Add firewall button

  6. For the New Rule, specify a Name.

    New firewall rule

  7. In the Source and Destination fields, 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 IPs, click + and select the desired objects. When you're done, click Keep.

      Select objects dialog box

    • If you're likely to reuse a group of the same 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. In the Service field, click + and, 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

  9. Select whether the rule is an Accept or Deny rule.

  10. 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 advanced gateway.

  11. 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.

When your VDC is provisioned in the:

  • Assured OFFICIAL platform, you're assigned five public IP addresses

  • Elevated OFFICIAL platform, 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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