This is part 2 of my SSP series. In the first post I explained what SSP is. SSP 5.1 arrived together with VCF 9.0, and one of its big additions is DFW 1-2-3-4. It’s a feature of Security Intelligence, available through SSP 5.1.
What is DFW 1-2-3-4?
It’s a guided workflow that takes you through segmentation in stages, following the lateral traffic patterns in your environment. Under the hood an analytics engine discovers communication patterns, identifies unprotected traffic and recommends firewall rules.
The idea is to prevent you from jumping straight to application-level microsegmentation without the visibility you need. Instead you start with the quick wins and work towards the application level.
The four stages
1. Security Segmentation Assessment & Report
You generate a Security Segmentation Report that shows your current posture. The segmentation score re-calibrates automatically when your environment changes, so you can track progress over time and show it to management or auditors.
2. Infrastructure (shared) services
Protect DNS, NTP, Syslog, SNMP, DHCP and LDAP first. The workflow discovers these services for you, or you can feed your known endpoints through a CSV file. Locking down DNS alone already removes some of the most common command and control and exfiltration paths.
3. Environment (zone) segmentation
Define zones like Dev and Production. You can import the metadata from a CSV, for example exported from a CMDB like ServiceNow or from vCenter. The workflow assigns the security tags, creates default zone-level rules and monitors for traffic leaking between zones.
4. Application microsegmentation
This stage has three steps:
4a. Map workloads to applications, again via CSV. The workflow auto-tags them and creates the application groups.
4b. Define ring-fencing for each application. The system recommends rules that only allow communication between the permitted entities.
4c. Continuously monitor the applications, before and after publishing rules, and fine-tune the rules between the application tiers.
My take
VMware says a typical rollout can be done in as little as a few weeks. I’d treat that as a best case, because the CSV input (zones, workload-to-application mapping) depends on how good your CMDB data is. But the structure alone is useful, especially in brownfield environments where nobody knows exactly what talks to what.
When I started working with vDefend, I quickly noticed that SSP is often treated as “that thing you also have to deploy”. In reality it’s the foundation for a big part of the vDefend feature set. This is the first post in a small series about SSP. Here I explain what SSP is and what runs on it. In the next posts I’ll go through what’s new in SSP 5.1 and 5.2.
What is SSP?
SSP is a high-performance, scalable platform that runs vDefend features like the Security Segmentation Report and Score, Security Intelligence, Metrics, Network Detection and Response, Malware Prevention and Network Traffic Analysis. Think of it as a scale-out data lake that ingests network flow records and telemetry. On top of that data it gives you flow visibility, security assessment scores, policy recommendations and guided workflows.
Under the hood it’s Kubernetes. You deploy it with the SSP Installer (SSPi) appliance, and once it’s running you can follow what’s happening with plain kubectl commands. I used that in a previous post to follow an NSX onboarding.
What doesn’t run on SSP?
This one confuses people. The enforcement itself stays in NSX. Distributed Firewall, Gateway Firewall and the malware policy and service VM management are still done through the NSX API. So your firewall keeps working without SSP. What you miss is the analysis, the guided workflows and the advanced threat prevention on top of it.
Why a separate platform?
Processing flow data from a whole private cloud needs its own scalable layer, separate from the NSX management plane. SSP is a self-contained, scale-out platform with a simplified network design and streamlined lifecycle management. That makes deploying Security Intelligence, NDR and Malware Prevention a lot easier than it used to be.
During the deployment of SSP (Security Services Platform) 5.1.1, I ran into an issue while onboarding the NSX instance.
This error means that there is still an old SSP installation onboarded in NSX. In my lab environment this was the case and the old SSP installation got corrupted due to storage issues and could not get correctly ofboarded and decommisioned. Luckily there is a kb that can help you clean up NSX and SSP.
After running the script the NSX site cleanup is complete, and you can go try to onboard NSX again to SSP. During the onboarding you can follow the onboarding process:
k get site -A
k describe site 098ad7b9-cdea-46b8-82a7-1f2e3d1fd366 -n nsxi-platform
When you see “OnboardingInProgress”, you just have to hold on a little bit until it says “OnboardingComplete”.
In the SSP you now shall see that NSX is correctly onboarded!
In my lab I tried to deploy Aria Operations for Networks 6.12.1 (AON/vRNI) from Aria Suite LifeCycle 8.16 (ASLC/vRLCM). Before the deployment of AON I successfully deployed other products:
Attempted to deploy Aria Ops for Networks 6.12.1 but it failed with LCMVSPHERECONFIG1000016 error.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
java.io.IOException: com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SystemError
at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm.drivers.vsphere65.vlsi.utils.ExceptionMappingUtils.mapAndThrowImportVAppExceptions(ExceptionMappingUtils.java:78)
at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm.drivers.vsphere65.deploy.impl.BaseOvfDeploy.importOvf(BaseOvfDeploy.java:713)
at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm.plugin.core.vsphere.tasks.DeployOvfTask.execute(DeployOvfTask.java:251)
at com.vmware.vrealize.lcm.automata.core.TaskThread.run(TaskThread.java:62)
at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source)
at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error Code: LCMVSPHERECONFIG1000016 IO Exception occurred while performing the operation. Check the logs for more information. Unexpected ioexception occurred.
After a successful upgrade of NSX, after the last step the upgrade of the management plane the compute manager disappeared, let’s see how we can fix that!
When i try to add the vCenter it says it is already registered, let’s check with the API.
First do a API GET in Postman to get the compute manager id:
Output:
Now we have the compute manager id, we can check if it is registered and up:
Output:
As you can see the compute manager is registered and up, why is it not showing up in the UI?
Solution:
Login with the admin user by SSH, and run the following command.
start search resync inventory
Wait a few seconds and refresh the UI, now the Compute Manager is back!
Recently i got the question if in one Cloud Director Tenant (Organization) Granular Role Based Access Control and separation of rights can be configured between multiple teams within that Organization.
Details:
In our Test case Team-A is responsible for Org VDC A and can only manage and view the Edge GW resources (networks, Edge Gateways) within that VDC-Group. Team-B responsible for Org VDC B and can manage and view the all resources in all VDC-Groups, Except the Edge GW in Org VDC A. This Edge GW can only be managed by the Team-A.
Also because of some Tenant requirements the T0 (VRF) is also split between Internet and Customer specific. You can read more about this setup in an this post.
Requirements:
Separation of Rights between Org VDCs
Shared networks between Org VDCs
Team-A Can only manage the Edge GW in ORG VDC A
Team-B can manage all resources in both ORG VDCs except the Edge GW in ORG VDC A
Setup:
One Provider VDC (vCenter)
One Organization in Cloud Director (Tenant1)
Two Org VDC connected to the same Provider VDC (ORG VDC A & ORG VDC B)
Two Data Center Groups (VDC Group A & VDC Group B)
Two Edge GW (Edge A connected to VDC Groupp A & Edge Bconnected to VDC Group B)
Tenant Acces Role Team-A
Tenant Acces Role Team-B
Datacenter Groups
From version 10.2, VMware Cloud Director supports Data Center Group networking backed by NSX-T Data Center.
A Data Center Group acts as a Cross-VDC router that provides centralized networking administration, egress point configuration, and east-west traffic between all networks within the group.
Using Data Center Groups, we can share organization networks across various ORG VDCs. To do so we first group the virtual data centers, then create a VDC network that is scoped to the Data Center Group. A data center group can contain between one and 16 virtual data centers that are configured to share multiple egress points.
We need to created 2 Data Center Groups and connect them to the participating VDC & Edges
VDC Group A -> ORG VDC A (24-2 in picture below) & Edge A VDC Group B -> ORG VDC B (24 in picture below) & Edge B
Roles
By default, organization VDCs are shared with all users and groups that have a role which includes the Allow Access to All Organization VDCs right.
As an Organization Administrator, you can limit the access to each of the organization VDCs in your organization to specific users and groups.
Our organization has multiple organization VDCs and we want to have them managed separately, so create a custom role that would function as an organization VDC administrator and assign it to specific users or groups within your organization, providing them with access only to a specific VDC’s compute and networking resources.
For Team-B we can use the predefined role Organization Administrator. In this role the following right is allowed: Allow Access to All Organization VDCs
This permission is exactly what is tells you it does, giving you permission to ALL Organizations VDC in the Organization. So with this role we are able to manage VM’s, networks, etc in all the Organization VDC’s.
Exactly what we need for Team-B.
For Team-A we need to make a new role with more granular permissions. Create a new role and exclude the Allow Access to All Organization VDCs right. Set the rest of the permissions to view and manage the Edges and Networks.
Publish both Roles to the Tenant and create 2 users in the Tenant.
Limit Access to ORG-VDC
Now we need to limit the access to the Org VDC, on the Virtual Data Center dashboard screen, click the card of the virtual data center that you want to limit access to.
Under Settings, click Sharing, The list of users and groups within the organization that have access to the VDC appears. To change the access settings to the organization VDC, click Edit.
Select Specific Users and Groups, From the Users list, select the users that you want to provide with access to the VDC, same procedure if you are using groups.
So for ORG VDC A select Team-A, Team-B already has access to all ORG VDC because of the Allow Access to All Organization VDCs right.
To share the VDC with the selected users and groups, click Share. At this moment Team-A can only view and manage Edges and Networks in ORG VDC A, and Team B can view and manage all resources in both ORG VDCs, also the Edge in ORG VDC A. if we need to get that sorted out we need to created roles and groups for every thinkable Resource set (Edge Admin, VM Admin, DFW Admin, etc) in every ORG VDC.
But another requirement in this Test Case is the Shared Network between ORG VDCs. For this requirement it is needed to add the other VDC to the participating VDCs in the Data Center Group.
As soon as you configure this Team-A (which can only see the Edge-A in ORG VDC A), immediately can see the Edge-B under ORG VDC B. A no go in our case. The rights are distributed very horizontal. So as soon as you have multiple participating VDC in your Data Center group the team that was restricted to viewing and managing the resources in ORG VDC A, can now also view and manage the resources it is permitted to in ORG VDC B.
Conclusion
For this Test Case the outcome was negative as we needed shared networks between ORG VDCs. If the sharing of networks is not needed, you set a very Granular RBAC model, but keep in mind when you set the Allow Access to All Organization VDCs right in a role, the users/groups that have this role are allowed to show all resources they are eligible to in All Organization VDCs
Half way december i switched to another team at my current employer, and got my hands dirty with Cloud director, NSX-T and AVI. As this was my first real hands-on with VMware Cloud Director. I was given the task to investigate some scenarios in which a tenant is given a second Edge Gateway, for the separation of Internet and Customer Networks traffic.
Before describing the scenarios, I’ll assume you have basic NSX-T, routing and VCD knowledge.
Current Tenant Setup
In the current setup a tenant is given:
Cloud Director (10.3): Organization (example: Tenant1)
Cloud Director: Org VDC
NSX-T (3.2): VRF based tier-0 gateway for both Internet VRF and Customer VRF connected to Parent T0
Cloud Director NSX-T: 1 Edge Gateway (T1)
Clloud Director NSX-T: 1 VDC Group
If Load balancing is used: dedicated AVI Service Engine Group
Because there is a 1:1 relation between the T0 and the Edge Gateway (dedicated T0), route advertisement of connected tenant networks is available.
The traffic for both the customer networks and Internet is flowing through the same Tenant Edge gateway and VRF based tier-0 gateway.
The first scenario I tested is based on a Shared T0 (in VCD) and 2 Edge Gateways (1 for Internet and 1 for Customer Networks).
Setup:
Cloud Director: Organization (example: Tenant1)
Cloud Director: Org VDC
NSX-T: VRF based tier-0 gateway for both Internet VRF and Customer VRF connected to Parent T0 (parent T0 is shared between 5 Tenants)
Cloud Director NSX-T: Set T0 to shared
Cloud Director NSX-T: two Edge Gateway (T1) connected to the same T0 (shared)
Cloud Director NSX-T: two VDC Groups (Data Center Groups)
If Load balancing is used: Shared AVI Service Engine Group (dedicated as described in current setup can also be used).
The downside of a Shared T0 is that route advertising of Tenant network connected to the Edge Gateway (T1) isn’t available to the T0.
Tenant VMs can connect to the internet or customer networks by using NAT and firewall rules. SNAT rules need to be created for outbound traffic and DNAT rules inbound traffic. Only use private IP spaces can be used for tenant networks connected to the Edge Gateway (T1).
Also because we use two Edge Gateways in an Org VDC we need to create 2 VDC Groups (Data Center Groups), because there is a restriction of 1 Edge Gateway per VDC Group (Data Center Group), two Datacenter Groups also mean 2 Distributed Firewalls to manage.
If you need connection between a VM in VDC Group 1 and a VM in VDC Group 2, you can create a network that will be spanning across both VDC groups.
In this scenario we still have the BGPs for both Internet and Customer configured on 1 VRF based tier-0 gateway, so this is not completely dedicated. And it is giving a lot of extra effort configuring the SNAT and DNAT.
We also worked out a scenario if the tenant is using AVI. In the normal setup the tenat is given a dedicated Service Engine Group. We also discovered the option to share the Service Engine Group between the Internet and Customer Networks. This option is a valid solution as the AVI per Default configures separates the traffic based on VRF in the Service Engines.
Scenario 2 – 2 Edge GW with dedicated T0
For the 2nd scenario we decoupled also the VRF Based T0 and creating again a 1:1 relation (dedicated T0) between the Edge Gateway and the VRF Based T0’s. Because of this 1:1 relationship route advertisements are available to the T0.
Setup:
Cloud Director: Organization (example: Tenant1)
Cloud Director: Org VDC
NSX-T: VRF based tier-0 gateway for Internet VRF connected to Parent T0
NSX-T: VRF based tier-0 gateway for Customer VRF connected to Parent T0
Cloud Director NSX-T: Set T0 to be dedicated
Cloud Director NSX-T: two Edge Gateway (T1) connected to the dedicated T0
Cloud Director NSX-T: two VDC Groups (Data Center Groups)
If Load balancing is used: Dedicated AVI Service Engine Group (because no design Change is needed for current model)
If you need connection between a VM in VDC Group 1 and a VM in VDC Group 2, you can created a network that will be spanning across both VDC groups.
The downside of the Scenario is that there are a lot of extra resources needed, and these resources will be billed to the tenant.
Conclusion
We still wanted a Design that met the customer requirements and also is easy to implement in the current setup. Which already in use by several tenants and was the default tenant setup when the platform was initially designed.
In Scenario 1 the Shared setup of the shared VRF based T0 doesn’t met the Customer requirements of separating Customer Networks and Internet traffic. Also the lack of the route advertisements was an issue for the Tenant.
In Scenario 2 where we separated all parts of the setup, all the Tenant requirements were met. The downside of this Scenario is that because all parts of the setup are decoupled, the resources a tenant needs using this setup are doubled. This means:
Scenario 2 is basically a copy of the current scenario, so the initial setup will cost less time, where Scenario 1 will have some design changes (shared T0, no route advertisments, SNAT/DNAT).
This design was based upon some requirements of a tenant, i tried to take in account that we also van use this for other tenants with the same requirements.
I loved investigating these scenarios, and discovering Cloud Director! Watch out for the next post about a Test Case with RBAC on Cloud Director!
Thank you for reading!
I also would like to mention the following blog article that helped me creating this post, Thanks Daniël!
Recently we saw some warnings about expiring certificates in the NSX-T Global Manager and Local Manager.
When we clicked one of the alerts we got a small description and some API calls we can fire to apply new certificates.
In the Certificates overview (System > Certificates > Certificates), we could see that the certificates Issued to the Local Manager and Global Manager were expiring. The certification id’s were also corresponding to the ones in the alert (not the ones in my screenshots).
The API calls that were mentioned in the Alert description are for the renewal of certificate to the HTTP service (UI), not the Local/Global Manager certificates. The VMware Docs don’t explain in good detail how to change these certificates, i couln’t find it.
The only give away i could find was in step 6: (NSX Federation and the service type).
So before we can replace the certificates, we need to create new Self Signed Certificates for the Local Manager, and the Global Manager.
Create CSR on GM/LM:
to create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) on the Global or Local Manager go to: System > Certificates > CSRs and click on “Generate CSR“.
For the Global Manager do this via the Global Manager Appliance and for the Local Manager use the Local Manager Appliance, or use the drop down on the top of the screen to choose between your Global Manager or Local Managers.
Fill in all the fields and hit the GENERATE button, example below is for the Global Manager. For The local Manager just change the word global to local:
Now we can see a new CSR in the list, the next step is to self-sign the Global Manager CSR, select the CSR and under actions choose “Self Sign Certificate for CSR”
Choose your number of days:
Now we have a new Self-Signed certificate for the Global Manager in the certificates list, with this certificate we can replace the Principal Identity certificate for the Global Manager.
For the local manager certificates, follow the steps mentioned above on the local manager appliance.
Apply Self-Signed Certificate on the Global Manager
Before we can apply the SS certificate to the Global Manager we need to copy the certificate id, click on the ID, and then select the whole id in the pop-up and copy/paste it for later use:
Now we can Fire up Postman to apply the certificate by API:
Change the ACTION drop down to POST
Paste the following url to your Global Manager: Step 1 to 4
Set Authorization the same as the previous API Calls
Select Body and set it to none
Hit Send
If the Certificate is used by a node look for the used_by part, when there is a node_id, the certificate is still in use and can’t be deleted. If it is empty, you can delete the Certificate in the UI, you can do this check on the new certificate to see if it is used by the same node.
Sometimes the Certificates won’t release itself, so let’s release the damn thing:
Release a Certificate
Please keep in mind that you only release the certificate from the node_id if you are absolutly sure, if not please raise a ticket to VMware Support.
login with the admin user to the manager with ssh
then typest e, enter the root password and you are now at the shell
Use the certificate id and the node_id from the previous step:
now use the following API call to release the Certificate of the node_id: curl -k -X POST -H “Content-Type: application/json” -H ‘X-NSX-Username:admin’ -H ‘X-NSX-Groups:superuser’ -d ‘{“service_type”:”API”,”node_id”:”<node_id>“}’ “http://localhost:7440/nsxapi/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/<certificate-id>?action=release“
This should do it, you can check the certificate again with the previous step and look for the used_by, this should be emtpy now.
During a failover test with the Bare Metal Edges we ran into an issue when pulling the plug on 1 of the TOR switches. (TOR-LEFT). During that test all BGPs on both Bare Metal edges went down. So no North-South routing anymore 🙁
So why this behaviour? And what happens when we pull the plug on the other TOR switch (TOR-RIGHT). After performing the test with the TOR-RIGHT, the BGPs connected to TOR Left stayed established. So it has something to do with switch TOR-LEFT?
After checking the configuration on the TOR-LEFT switch we didn’t identified something that could cause this issue. But what could it be? Edges were configured by VMware guidelines and were identical configuration wise.
So going through the logs was the next step in the process, and i stumbled upon this part in the log file:
2022-10-17T10:37:08.578Z Update device fp-eth0 state to DOWN
2022-10-17T10:37:08.578Z Self Node 00363d34-fcdd-11ea-8e07-e4434ba66042 status changed from Up to Down (RTEP device down)
Can it have something to do with the federated setup (RTEP), is the RTEP only connecting over fp-eth0?
Cause:
Again i went through the setup but now i also checked the fp-eth0 connections to the switches. On both BareMetal Edges the fp-eth0 was connected to the TOR-LEFT. So when we pulled the plug on that Switch it triggered the RTEP going down, which led to all BGP session going down.
This is expected behavior according to VMware!
Solution:
The solution to this issue was pretty simple after we identified the cause. We switched the connection on the second Bare Metal Edge, so the pnics connected to TOR LEFT will be on TOR-RIGHT and vice versa. The opposite of the first Bare Metal Edge.
A while ago we ran into an issue after we did the upgrade from NSX-T version 3.1.3.6 to 3.1.3.7. In the alarms section at one Site. Still wanted to do a post about the issue and the solution/workaround:
Time to check the connection! Login to the Edges and grap the VRF id of the RTEP TUNNEL.
Check the BGP and ping between the RTEP ip addresses on both sites.
As you can see all BGPs are established and the ping commands give a reply. Let’s do another check from Postman:
Open Postman and fire a GET api call to the nsx-manager to grab the edge id we need in the next api call: API GET call:
https://<nsxmanager ip>/api/v1/transport-nodes/
Just select Basic Auth under the Authorization tab and fill in the Admin credentials.
Hit Send, when getting a reply in the Body, search for the edge name and the corresponding id.
Now we use this id to get the RTEP status:
GET https://<nsxmanagerip>/api/v1/transport-nodes/<edgenodeid>/inter-site/bgp/summary
Check the output and the Return Status for issues, as you can see in the example above the BGP to one of the peers is establised.
Solution:
So it seems like the issue is known in the 3.1.3.7 version in a 3 manager nodes setup.
The node which has generated the alarm, only that node can clear alarm from in-memory when it will receive remove alarm from the edge node. The Alarm was resolved on 1 of the manager nodes, but it was showing on other nodes and it was keeping the alarm as active.
The following workaround will remove the alarm: Restart the proton service on ALL manager nodes.
– SSH with the admin user to the NSX-T manager nodes: – execute the following commands:
Stop service proton Start service proton UPDATE: The issue is fixed in version 3.2.1
