How To determine the service console firewall security level

Log on to the service console and acquire root privileges.

Execute these two commands to determine whether incoming and outgoing traffic is blocked or  allowed:

esxcfg-firewall -q incoming

esxcfg-firewall -q outgoing

Interpret the results as follows:

Command Line Response Security Level

Incoming ports blocked by default. High

Outgoing ports blocked by default.

Incoming ports blocked by default. Medium

Outgoing ports not blocked by default.

Incoming ports not blocked by default. Low

Outgoing ports not blocked by default.

 

To set the service console firewall security level

Log on to the service console and acquire root privileges.

Execute one of the following commands as applicable.

To set the service console firewall to medium security:

esxcfg-firewall –allowOutgoing –blockIncoming

To set the virtual firewall to low security:

esxcfg-firewall –allowIncoming –allowOutgoing

To return the service console firewall to high security:

esxcfg-firewall –blockIncoming –blockOutgoing

Execute the following command to restart the vmware-hostd process:

service mgmt-vmware restart