The VMware NSX distributed firewall provides L2-L4 stateful firewall services to any workload in the VMware NSX environment. The distributed firewall is embedded in the ESXi kernel, scales horizontally with the ESXi hosts, and performs at line rate. It is designed to provide protection, isolation, and segmentation of East/West traffic within the data center environment.

VMware Cloud Providers can leverage this functionality to offer zero-trust micro-segmentation to their customers’ hosted workloads, and controlled isolated access to shared management resources where required.