Book Image

Learning VMware NSX - Second Edition

By : Ranjit Singh Thakurratan
Book Image

Learning VMware NSX - Second Edition

By: Ranjit Singh Thakurratan

Overview of this book

VMware NSX is a platform for the software-defined data center. It allows complex networking topologies to be deployed programmatically in seconds. SDNs allow ease of deployment, management, and automation in deploying and maintaining new networks while reducing and in some cases completely eliminating the need to deploy traditional networks. The book allows you a thorough understanding of implementing Software defined networks using VMware’s NSX. You will come across the best practices for installing and configuring NSX to setup your environment. Then you will get a brief overview of the NSX Core Components NSX’s basic architecture. Once you are familiar with everything, you will get to know how to deploy various NSX features. Furthermore, you will understand how to manage and monitor NSX and its associated services and features. In addition to this, you will also explore the best practices for NSX deployments. By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy Vmware NSX in your own environment with ease. This book can come handy if you are preparing for VMware NSX certification.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
9
Conclusion

Distributed firewalls


NSX provides L2-L4 stateful firewall services by means of a distributed firewall that runs in the ESXi hypervisor kernel. Because the firewall is a function of the ESXi kernel it provides massive throughput and performs at near line rate. When the ESXi host is initially prepared by NSX, the distributed firewall service is installed in the kernel by deploying the kernel VIB—VMware internetworking service insertion platform (VSIP). VSIP is responsible for monitoring and enforcing security policies on all the traffic flowing through the data plane. The distributed firewall (DFW) throughput and performance scales horizontally as more ESXi hosts are added.

DFW instances are associated to each vNIC and every vNIC requires one DFW instance. A virtual machine with 2 vNICs has two DFW instances associated with it, each monitoring its own vNIC and applying security policies to it. DFW is ideally deployed to protect virtual to virtual or virtual to physical traffic. This makes...