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NSX-T Datacenter Firewall


In NSX-T we have two types of firewall which we will discuss into this post.


1) Distributed firewall
2) Gateway firewall


Lets talk about one by one..

1) Distributed firewall:


A distributed firewall hosted at the host (hypervisor) level which is kernel-embedded statefull firewall. This kind of firewall mostly used in between the transport nodes or you can say within in east-west network.

Basically distributed firewall helps protecting the virtual machine at the virtual machine level from the hacking attack.

Many people have a question like , if we have perimeter firewall at the physical layer to protect the network then why we require a firewall (distributed firewall) at the VM level......

  To answer this question, Yes many of you are correct that perimeter firwall is there to protect the network at the top level. However, there are some attach which directly attach at the VM level like attach from USB drive, phishing emails and advertisements attracts.

  To protect at VM level kind of attach its quite essential to deploy something which is (distributed firewall) in case of NSX-T.

Fig:1 Distributed firewall flow

Lets point some of the highlights of distributed firewall.

  • It resides outside the VM guest OS.
  • It control the I/O path and from the nic (vnic). Now, lets say a VM has 4 nics, then in that case distributed firewall will protect all the nics of the VM individually.
  • It monitor the states of active connection and used this information to traverse the VM vnic.
  • It validates all the tables (connection and Rules) to validate and compare the packets if connection needed to accept or deny the connection on VM from the firewall.

2) Gateway firewall


Gateway firewall is also knows as perimeter firewall which protect the traffic to and from the physical environment.

It provide both North-South and East-West connectivity which enables tenants to access the public network, as well as connecting between different network with the same tenants.

The gateway router is a configured partition of a traditional network hardware router, commonly refereed to as virtual routeing and forwarding (VRF). It replace the hardware functionality create multiple routing domain with single router.



Fig. Gateway router


Gateway router perform a subset of the task that can be handled by physical router and each can contain multiple routing instance and routing table.

Using Gateway router can be an efficient way to maximize router usage, because a set of gateway router with a single physical router can perform the operation previously performed by several piece of equipment.


Some of the highlights of distributed firewall
  • It is similar to the port based firewall and applied to Tier-0 and Tier-1 Gateway nodes.
  • NSX gateway must be backed with  NSX Edge Cluster which is combination of 2 or more Edge nodes VM or baremental.
  • Destination (NAT) and source NAT rules are implemented to uplink and back-plane interface of the service router (SR).
  • The gateway firewall is implemented only on the uplink of Tier-0 and Tier-1 gateway nodes.

A Gateway router is comprised of up to two components: a distributed router (DR), and optionally one or more service routers (SR).   
  
The DR is kernel based and spans hypervisors, providing local routing functions to those VMs that are connected to it, and also exists in any edge nodes the logical router is bound to. Functionally, the DR is responsible for one-hop distributed routing between logical switches and/or Gateway routers connected to this logical router, and functions similar to the distributed logical router (DLR) in earlier viersions of NSX.

The SR is responsible for delivering services that are not currently implemented in a distributed fashion, such as stateful NAT, load balancing, DHCP or VPN services. Service Routers are deployed on the Edge node cluster that is selected when the T0/T1 router is initially configured.

To reiterate, a Gateway router in NSX-T always has an associated DR, regardless of whether it's deployed as a T0 or a T1. It will also have an associated SR created if either of the following is true:

The Gateway router is a Tier-0 router, even if no stateful services are configured
The Gateway router is a Tier-1 router, is linked to a Tier-0 router, and has services configured that do not have a distributed implementation (such as NAT, LB, DHCP or VPN)

--Happy Learing --- :)

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