Manage firewalls

Introduction to firewalls

The platform provides a unified interface to firewalls in varied cloud environments.

This section describes firewall policies, which are similar to security groups. The platform supports firewall policies in private cloud with network managers (NSX, NSX-T) and in public cloud.

Abiquo firewall policies represent.

AWS security groups
Azure firewall policies
GCP firewall rules
OCI network security groups

For more details, please see the public cloud features table for each provider.

In vCloud Director, the platform also supports classic firewalls, which are Edge firewalls at level of the public cloud region (orgVDC). See Manage classic firewalls.

Synchronize firewall policies with the cloud provider

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Create a firewall policy

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Edit firewall rules

You can define firewall rules for inbound and outbound traffic in your firewall policy.

In AWS, before you edit firewall rules, synchronize the firewall to update the rules because AWS will not allow you to create a rule that already exists in the security group. Remember that it may take some time for firewall rules to propagate throughout AWS. Until the rules have propagated, the platform will not be able to detect them. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/query-api-troubleshooting.html#eventual-consistency

To add a new firewall rule:

Select the virtual datacenter or location
Select the firewall
On the Firewall rules panel, click the pencil Edit button
Select the Inbound or Outbound tab for the traffic direction you wish to control
Enter the details of a rule
1. Protocol
  - Select from Common protocols, OR
  - Select and enter a Custom protocol
2. Port range with the Start port and End port that this rule will apply to.
  To enter one port, enter the same value twice, or optionally apply the rule to a number of ports at the same time.
  For Azure and GCP, you can enter:
  1. a single port, such as 80
  2. a range, such as 1024-65535
  3. a list of port/range, such as 80,1024-65535
3. Sources or Targets as a network address and netmask, or a comma separated list of these (with no spaces)
Click Add. The firewall rule will be added to the Firewall rules list
Enter more rules as required, then click Save

Edit the rules for a firewall policy to add allowed protocols and ports

Create a firewall policy in GCP

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Set a firewall policy as the default for a virtual datacenter

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Edit a firewall policy

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Add tags to a firewall policy

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Move a firewall policy to another virtual datacenter

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Display firewall policies

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Assign a firewall policy to a VM

See VM firewalls

Delete firewall policy rules

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Delete a firewall policy

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Manage firewalls with the API

API Documentation

For the Abiquo API documentation of this feature, see Abiquo API Resources and the page for this resource FirewallPoliciesResource.