Firewall exclusion lists are made of groups that can be excluded from a firewall rule based on group membership.
NSX Manager supports system excluded groups, and user excluded groups:
- System excluded groups are managed by the system, and are read-only for users. System excluded groups include Malware Prevention and Service Insertion SVMs together with NSX Managers and NSX Edge appliances that are deployed via a configured Compute Manager.
- User excluded groups are managed by the user, and empty by default.
Virtual machines such as load balancers, firewalls, virtual network functions (routing, switching, etc.), and any virtual machines that require promiscuous mode must be in a DFW Exclusion list. VMware does not support adding those virtual machines to DFW; they must be manually added to user excluded groups.
In NSX Manager cluster, the first node must be manually added to the Distributed Firewall Exclude List.
User-defined groups can be excluded from firewall rules, and there are a maximum of 100 groups that can be on the list. IP sets, MAC sets, and Active Directory groups cannot be included as members in a group that is used in a firewall exclusion list.
Exclude lists are supported on a Global Manager (GM) in NSX Federation. On a Local Manager (LM), there will be two exclude lists: one from the GM, and the LM's own exclude list. All members of both lists are excluded.
Antrea groups are not supported in a firewall exclusion list.