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

The steps for creating firewall rules vary depending on what type of edge gateway you're working with:

Note

We recommend that you convert your edge to an advanced gateway to access the latest vCloud Director functionality. For more information, see How to convert your edge to an advanced gateway.

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 for an advanced gateway

To create a firewall rule on an advanced gateway:

  1. In vCloud Director, access the edge gateway settings.

    For more detailed instructions, see How to access edge gateway settings

  2. Select the Firewall tab.

    Firewall tab

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

    Add firewall button

  4. For the New Rule, specify a Name.

    New firewall rule

  5. 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

  6. 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

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

  8. Click Save changes.

    Save changes link on Firewall tab

Creating firewall rules for a standard edge

Note

You can only manage advanced gateways in the new vCloud Director 9.1 tenant portal. If you're working with a standard edge gateway, you must first switch to the vCloud Director web console to manage the edge. For more information, see How to switch to the vCloud Director web console from the tenant portal.

To create a firewall rule on a standard edge:

  1. In vCloud Director, click the Administration tab.

    Administration tab in vCloud Director

    For more detailed instructions, see the Getting Started Guide for UKCloud for VMware

  2. Double-click the virtual data centre (VDC) that you want to work with, or right-click the VDC and select Open.

  3. Select the Edge Gateways tab.

    Edge Gateways tab

  4. Right-click the edge gateway and select Edge Gateway Services.

  5. Select the Firewall tab.

    Firewall tab

  6. Click Add.

    Add button on the Firewall tab

  7. Give the rule a name and assign a source IP address and source port type. This can be any port or a specific port number.

  8. Add a destination IP address and port, then choose which protocol to assign to the rule.

  9. Select whether to make the rule an Allow or Deny rule, and whether to log the network traffic for this particular rule. (Log viewing is currently not available owing to the multi-tenant nature of the environment. We are working to make this feature available in the future.)

    Note

    With firewall rules, you are allowing packets through from the external network to the public IP address which is subsequently NAT-ed. A common mistake is to create firewall rules from external to an internal Org Network IP address or range.

    Edit Firewall Rule dialog box

  10. When you're finished, click OK.

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-P IP addresses

In the examples 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.

Advanced gateway

Firewall rule to allow SSH through from the internet - advanced gateway

Standard edge

Firewall rule to allow SSH through from the internet - standard edge

Next steps

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

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