As a vSphere system administrator, you know vCenter, ESXi, clusters, and vMotion like the back of your hand. You manage VMs using folders, tags, and resource pools. When it comes to network security, traditional data center network designs often push traffic out to physical hardware firewalls—a process known as "hair-pinning." This creates performance bottlenecks, network complexity, and blind spots for "East-West" traffic (VM-to-VM traffic within the data center).
VMware vDefend solutions change this paradigm. Instead of pulling traffic out of the virtual switch to inspect it on a physical box, vDefend brings enterprise-grade firewall and threat prevention capabilities directly into the hypervisor.
VMware vDefend consists of Distributed Firewall (DFW), Gateway Firewall (GFW), and Security Intelligence. VMware vDefend Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is an additional product that provides increased network security capabilities protecting organizations against advanced threats, including ransomware. For those new to these solutions, this article provides a technical overview of the vDefend components.
