Configure vSphere Host Firewall for VMware vSphere (vSOM)

welcome to our demonstration on how to configure a VMware vSphere host firewall each vSphere host has a local firewall that is used to protect its management network there are two ways to manage the host firewall using the vSphere client and by using the esxcli command let's first learn how we can configure the firewall using the vSphere web client we log in on the web client select the vCenter icon and navigate to the list of hosts then select the host and then select manage settings in security profile here we can configure firewall ports for both incoming and outgoing communication to configure the firewall click the edit button scroll down to the service you want to enable like in this example we click syslog and select the check box this allows communication to the service over the corresponding port using the specified protocols note that we also have the option to specify a list of allowed IP addresses to do that we simply deselect the option to allow connections from any IP address provide the list of authorized IPS in the Box using the syntax outlined at the bottom and select ok let's now see how we can configure firewall from the ESXi shell using the esxcli command we log in on the ESXi shell we will first display the statistics of the firewall on the host using the esxcli network firewall get command here we see the firewall is enabled and loaded next we use the esxcli network firewall rule set list command to show the current firewall settings note when working from the command line the firewall entries are referred to as rule sets here we see a list of all the rule sets and whether or not they are enabled to list the details of a particular rule set we specify the rule set name using the - - rule set ID option let's enable I scuzzy traffic on the host to do this we will use the esxcli network firewall rule set set command let's now look at the IP addresses they allow to communicate with a host using ice Guzzi to do this we use the esxcli network firewall rule set allowed IP list command we see that by default there are no IP restrictions let's now limit the list of allowed IP addresses to just the 10.2 4.1 37.0 network to do this we use the esxcli network firewall rule set set command you together with the esxcli network firewall rule set allowed IP command you we now see the access to the host using ice Guzzi is limited to just the 10.2 4.1 37.0 network let's now disable I scuzzy traffic to the host to do this we use the esxcli network firewall rule set set command again after making changes to the firewall we activate the changes by reloading the firewall using the esxcli network firewall refresh command in summary each vSphere host has a local firewall that is used to protect the management network the firewall can be configured from the web client or from the command line by default all non required Services ports are disabled when enabling port you have the ability to also restrict access to a limited set of IP addresses this concludes our demonstration on how to configure a VMware vSphere host firewall thank you

Channel: VMware

Views: 19,287

Keywords: vmware, vsphere, vcenter, VSOM, getting started, intro, setup, configure, configuration, install, installation, hypervisor, virtualization, operations, virtual machine, data center, datacenter, esxi, firewall, block, manage, services, Cloud Management, vSOM, vRealize Operations, vSphere, Management

Id: bzjsjQdnTuk

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2013