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Quick Tip - List all open ports on the VCSA / PSC

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The list of required ports for both a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and Platform Services Controller (PSC) are pretty well documented here (6.5), here (6.0) and here (5.5) for customers who require this information to setup external connectivity within their networking infrastructure. Having said that, it is may not always be clear on what ports are actually opened as they will usually depend on the type of deployment and the services that are running. Instead, some customers have inquired about getting a list of all open ports directly from the VCSA/PSC to ensure they have the actual configuration which can be used to build firewall rules and/or for auditing purposes.

Today, the only method is to login directly into the VCSA/PSC via SSH (you could also use GuestOps API, so that SSH is NOT required) and fetching this information using iptables. Hopefully, in the future, this can be made available as part of the VAMI API since it already covers some basic inbound firewall rule capabilities. In the mean time, below are examples of how to get all the open ports for both VCSA/PSC

Run the following command to view all open ports on VCSA/PSC:

iptables -L port_filter -n --line-numbers


You will notice in the output above, there is also a chain number on the far left side which is associated with each rule. This chain number can be used to inspect the rule further and some rules include a nice alias to help you identify what the port might be used for.

For example, we can run the following to inspect chain rule #30 and find out this port is being used for syslog. If we want the port number, we simply add the -n option.

iptables -L port_filter 30
iptables -L port_filter 30 -n


Not all of the firewall rules have an alias name and even if they do, it still may not be apparent on what service is opening that particular port. We can actually look at the firewall rule definitions which are located under /etc/vmware/appliance/firewall and you will see a JSON file for each of the VCSA/PSC services that require firewall rules to be opened up. For a given port, you can just grep in this directory to identify the service that is requiring the port.

For example, if we take a look at the vmware-syslog, we see that it requires tcp/udp 514 and tcp 1514 under the "rules" array which defines the list of external ports open. You can ignore the internal ports as those are not exposed to the outside world but used by internal services. In case the services are still not clear, you can always reference the port number back to the documentation which I had linked above to get more details about the particular port.

Native OVF support for Fusion/Workstation 2017 Tech Preview 

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The VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases and there is a ton of new and awesome capabilities which you can read more about here and here. One of the exciting new features, which I was very fortunate to have been involved with is finally here, native OVF property support! Although customers have had the ability to import OVF/OVAs for some time now, if they included OVF properties, they would be ignored and often times this would result in a failed deployment as those properties are required for the initial setup.

A great example of this is trying to run the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) on either Fusion or Workstation. Today, the only workaround is to manually edit the VMX file and supplying the correct OVF properties which I have blogged about here. With the latest TP release of Fusion/Workstation, when you import an OVF/OVA that contains OVF properties, the UI will automatically render the required information directly into the UI without needing users to manually touch the VMX files.

Here is a screenshot of deploying the latest VCSA 6.5d OVA (jump to bottom for some additional VCSA tidbits when deploying to Fusion/Workstation):

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Visualizing live network traffic on the vCenter Server Appliance using net-glimpse

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Last week I came across a really interesting OSS project called net-glimpse which allows you to easily visualize your network traffic in real-time and making that available using any standard web browser. I thought it would be neat to see what this might look like running on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I got it up in running in just a couple of minutes and even shared the results on Twitter as you can see from the tweet below:


I had couple of folks ask about the setup and I figure I would post a quick write up. While looking at the project, I found that net-glimpse includes quite a bit of customizations in the colors, data collection and how data is displayed. Specifically, rather than relying on the well-known ports that have already been pre-defined, you can also add additional custom ports and specify the label that it should automatically used. This gave me an idea, instead of a generic visualization of the VCSA, we could get specific service information and have those label automatically get displayed.

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