OK..I’ll admit it: I am spoiled by the capabilities of vSphere. What other platform lets you schedule system updates that will occur unattended and without outages of the applications being used? I don’t mean the winders patches, they require a monthly reboot. I am talking about the hypervisor updates. VMware Update Manager coordinates all of this for you. Then along comes vShield Zones to break it all.
First, let me explain what I am trying to do. To simplify things, vShield Zones is a firewall for vSphere Virtual Machines. Rather than regurgitate how it works, take a look at Rodney’s excellent post. A customer has decided to use vShield Zones to help with PCI Compliance. The desire is that only certain VMs will be allowed to communicate with certain other VMs using specific network ports, and to audit that traffic. ’nuff said.
vShield Zones seems to be the perfect solution for this. It works almost seamlessly with vCenter and the underlying ESXi hosts. It provides hardened Linux Virtual Appliances (vShield Agents) to provide the firewalling. It provides a fairly nice management interface to create the firewall rules and distribute them to the vShield Agents. Best of all, IT’S FREE! At least for vSphere Advanced versions and above. Keep in mind, that this is still considered a 1.x release and some things need to be worked out.
Now, on to the gotchas.