Firewall sections are used to group a set of firewall rules.

A firewall section is made up from one or more individual firewall rules. Each individual firewall rule contains instructions that determine whether a packet should be allowed or blocked; which protocols it is allowed to use; which ports it is allowed to use and so forth. Sections are used for multi-tenancy , such as specific rules for sales and engineering departments in separate sections.

A section can be defined as enforcing stateful or stateless rules. Stateless rules are treated as traditional stateless ACLs. Reflexive ACLs are not supported for stateless sections. A mix of stateless and stateful rules on a single logical switch port is not recommended and may cause undefined behavior.

Rules can be moved up and down within a section. For any traffic attempting to pass through the firewall, the packet information is subjected to the rules in the order shown in the section, beginning at the top and proceeding to the default rule at the bottom. The first rule that matches the packet has its configured action applied, and any processing specified in the rule's configured options is performed and all subsequent rules are ignored (even if a later rule is a better match). Thus, you should place specific rules above more general rules to ensure those rules are not ignored. The default rule, located at the bottom of the rule table, is a "catchall" rule; packets not matching any other rules will be enforced by the default rule.

Note: A logical switch has a property called N-VDS mode. This property comes from the transport zone that the switch belongs to. If the N-VDS mode is ENS (also known as Enhanced Datapath), then you cannot create a firewall rule or section with the switch or its ports in the Source, Destination, or Applied To fields.