VMware NSX is a software defined solution that brings the power of virtualization to network and security.
There are many great papers about NSX in general: for example here & here and many others, the purpose of this demo is not to dive into everything that NSX does, Instead I have focused on one capability in particular and that is the intelligent grouping of NSX Service Composer with the Distributed Firewall (DFW) and how to utilize it to make life easier for SQL DBAs and security admins, its doesn’t have to be only SQL Server, it can be any other database or application for that matter but for this demo I am focusing on SQL Server.
First, a bit of background: The NSX Service Composer allows us to create groups called “Security groups”. These Security groups can have a dynamic membership criteria that can be based on multiple factors: It can be part of the computer name of a VM, its guest OS name, the VM name, AD membership or a tag (tags are especially cool as they can be set automatically by 3rd party tools like antivirus and IPSs, but that is for a different demo)
These Security groups are than placed inside the Distributed Firewall (DFW) rules which allows us to manage thousands of entities with just a few rules and without the need to add these entities to the Security Group manually.
In the demo I have created an environment that is set with 0 trust policy, that means that everything is secured and every packet between the VMs is inspected, the inspection is done on the VMs vNIC level in an east-west micro segmentation way. That means that if a certain traffic is not defined in the DFW it is not allowed to go through.
This is something that wasn’t really possible to do before NSX
Our production app database is an SQL database and in the demo the DBA wants to hot-clone it aside for testing purposes, but obviously the cloned SQL Server needs to have some network traffic allowed to pass to it, yet it needs to be secured from everything else.
Instead of having the traditional testing FW zone with its own physical servers, I created the rules that apply to a test DBs in the DFW, created a dynamic membership Security Group, and nested that group in the rules. Now, any database server that I will clone which corresponds to the criteria will be automatically placed in the rules. What’s really nice about this is that no traffic is going northbound to the perimeter FW because the packet inspection is done on the vNIC of the VMs (and only relevant rules to it are set on it) , no additional calls to security admins to configure the FW are needed after the first configuration has been made. This is a huge time saver , much more efficient in terms of resources (physical servers are now shared between zones) and a much more secure environment than having only a perimeter FW.
As usual any comment or feedback is welcome
Cheers,
Niran
