Distributed firewall comes with predefined categories for firewall rules. Categories allow you to organize security policies.

Categories are evaluated from left to right (Ethernet > Emergency > Infrastructure > Environment > Application), and the distributed firewall rules within the category are evaluated top down.

Table 1. Distributed Firewall Rule Categories
Ethernet

We recommend you include Layer 2 rules for this category.

 Emergency

We recommend you include quarantine and allow rules for this category.

 Infrastructure

We recommend you include rules which define access to shared services for this category. For example:

  • AD
  • DNS
  • NTP
  • DHCP
  • Backup
  • Management servers
 Environment

We recommend you include rules between zones for this category. For example:

  • Production vs development
  • PCI vs non-PCI
  • Inter business unit rules
 Application

We recommend you include rules between:

  • Applications
  • Application tiers
  • Micro services