Load Balancing Horizon View with NSX

This post will explain in detail how I was able to set up NSX load balancing in a test environment and was still able to meet the requirements I had for load balancing. The requirements I had for a load balancer for Horizon View were:

As simple as possible
Session performance is acceptable and scalable
Ability to automatically fail nodes so a reconnect gets back in less than one minute
Balance Horizon View SSL, PCoIP and HTML5 Blast session traffic appropriately
The entire solution must be able to leverage a single public IP address for all communication

So there are to primary ways of constructing an NSX load balancer, inline or one-armed. These drawings were borrowed from a VMworld 2014 slide deck.

In this particular example, we opted for one armed, which means the load balancer node will live on the same network segment as the security servers.

Let’s take a look at logically how this is set up in the test lab. You may notice that I used two ports for PCoIP, 4172 and 4173. This is because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, and with the requirement of a single IP address, keeping the PCoIP listen port for each security server separate was the easiest option. I was able to load balance and persist both 443 and 8443 with NSX, but stepped around the balancing for PCoIP and simply passed it through. In production you can just use another public IP address if you want to keep PCoIP on 4172, then just NAT it to the corresponding security server. If you need more detail on the lab setup, you can check out my previous post which has more detail on the firewall rules used.

General finding notes about the setup before we get into screen shots:

The demonstrated configuration is for external connectivity only at present, since persistence matters most when tunneled.
SSL passthru is utilized rather than offloading.
The DFW is in play here as well, and all firewall rules are in place according to to required communication.
In order to configure the security server to listen on 4173, I had to follow the KB and create a reghack on the box, AND configure the tunnel properly in the View GUI.
In order to get SSL and BLAST working together from a single VIP, I ended up needing separate virtual servers, pools and service monitoring profiles that all used the same VIP and Application profile.
I ended up using ssl_sessionid as the persistence type for both SSL and BLAST, and ended up using IPHASH for the load balancing algorithm.
I wasn’t able to configure a monitor to correctly say that 8443 was UP, instead it was in WARN(DOWN) on the 8443 monitor. I opted to simply leverage 443 as the monitor for the blast VIP, so there could potentially be a missed failover if only the blast service was down.

Let’s take a look at the configuration screen shots of the View specific load balancer edge that I used.

We opted for the simple configuraiton of SSL passthrough and SSL Session ID was used for persistence.

I found you had to create a separate monitor for each pool for it to function properly, not really sure why.

NSX-LB2015-09-24 23_31_03

You should be able to use the /favicon.ico to determine health as we do with other load balancers, but the plain GET HTTPS worked for me and favicon didn’t.

** Important, notice that no ports were specified in the server pool, only the monitor port. That was specified only in the virtual servers below.

NSX-LB2015-09-24 23_45_04

Let’s take a look at the screen shots of the View security server configuration.

If you have to make a security server listen on another port, don’t forget to change it in the registry as well as in the secure gateway URL field. Also don’t forget to let it through the firewall.

And voila! We have a working configuration. Here’s a quick demonstration of the failover time, which can be completely tuned. Of note, we only tested Blast failover, but SSL and PCoIP work just fine as well. The best part is we were able to create a COMPLETELY separate isolated and firewalled security server without even leveraging a DMZ architecture.

If you’re looking for another AWESOME post on how the NSX load balancer is utilized, I learned more from this one by Roi Ben Haim than from the pubs. Great step by step setup that helped me big time.

Horizon View and VMware NSX – Zero Trust Install

EDIT: 8/28/2016 There’s now a fling that will automatically prep rules and security groups for you. https://labs.vmware.com/flings/horizon-service-installer-for-nsx

Dave Kennedy is a netsec veteran and industry leader in the information security space, has written multiple books on the topic of penetration testing, is the founder of @TrustedSec, wrote the Social Engineering Toolkit, founded @Derbycon and on and on. Point is dude knows how to find a way in and pop a box like a boss. Check out this tweet he had not too long ago.

And with that red underlined statement, in my mind the micro segmentation use-case for VMware NSX speaks for itself. One of the easiest places to get access to from the outside is a user’s desktop, simply because users (often times helpdesk) can be tricked into going to a malicious website which can exploit the user’s desktop. We see this time and time again with not just email attachment, but phone spear phishing as well. Protecting the virtual desktops and servers with the DAPE model (Deny All Permit Exception) is becoming not a nice thing to have, but a near requirement for many businesses. One which security and networking teams are having a hard time doing once inside the perimeter and underneath the DMZ, especially with east west traffic inside defined networks.

It is for this reason I have been working the past few weeks on integrating NSX 6.2 and Horizon View 6.1 in my lab to implement not only zero trust desktops, but an entire zero trust hardened Horizon View Infrastructure. To me, a zero trust network infrastructure is pretty much like getting network access on a “need to have basis”. Unless specifically allowed (by policy), you’re blocked (by policy); not by traditional IP based rules. The pieces I set up in my lab include minimum functional connectivity to service the following components and services:

Horizon View Connection Servers
Horizon View Security Servers
Connectivity with vCenter and Horizon View Composer
Virtual Desktops with Identity based Firewall
~~NSX Load Balancers~~ (will do a separate post for this)

Let’s take a look logically at how the lab network is set up. It’s important to remember that while I set these up with NSX based logical networks for scalability, the NSX DFW (distributed firewall) does not require any NSX logical networks to function; the DFW can work just fine even with standard virtual switching because the firewall lives in the ESXi kernel.

Now let’s take a look physically at how this simple lab is set up.

Now let’s talk about some of the View components and what east-west and north-south we firewall rules we conceptually need to make to create to harden the horizon environment, not including user defined rules. The below generic categories are in regards to traffic we need to concern ourselves with. Remember, we are not providing and open IP stack, rather providing only the required ports for the software to function. Most of these ports can be found at the KB which defines View connectivity requirements.

Security Server

View Security Servers <–> HTTPS, PCoIP, Blast

View Security Servers <–> Virtual Desktops

Block the rest

Connection Server

View Connection Server <–> vCenter Server

View Connection Server <–> View Replica Server

View Connection Server <–> Virtual Desktops

View Connection Server <–> AD/DNS

View Connection Server <–> View Security Server

View Connection Server <–> View Administrator Static IPs

Block the rest

Virtual Desktops

Virtual Desktops <–> AD/DNS

Dynamic User Logins <–> Specified Internal Resources over Specified protocols

Block the rest

So now that we’ve seen the categories conceptually, let’s look at the service definition and service groups that I came up with. I broke them up into three basic categories.

Active Directory/DNS
Horizon View
User Defined

Let’s take a look at the active directory rules per several microsoft KB’s and some trial and error.

Custom Active Directory Aliases (NSX individual “Services”)

Custom Horizon View Aliases (NSX individual “Services”)

So we can group up those services into service groups for easy clean looking rules. Let’s take a look at those.

View Connection Server <–> vCenter

View Security Server <–> View Desktops

Security Servers <–> Connection Servers

View Desktops <–> Connection Servers

* Interesting note, at the time of writing with View 6.1.1 TCP 4002 was not a documented port requirement in the network requirements KB between desktops and connection servers and I found that it was definitely needed.

View Desktops <–> AD/DNS

View Connection Server <–> View Connection Server

*Note that even though it’s not documented, ADAM requires the random port range. Screen shot below of the connections…

Even though they’re not documented on the network page, I found most ports for AD (ADAM) communication are required from Connection Server to Connection Server. Was able to find this when I kept banging my head during the second connection server install with Log Insight.

User Defined Security Groups

So first of all you have to integrate the NSX manager with Active directory so that you can pull users and allocate ACLs based on users in AD. Do that under the NSX manager \ Manage section and add the domain.

Once the domain is configured, now we can actually add users into the security groups that we’ll use in the firewall rules. Let’s look at one of the dynamic user examples we’ll go over in this post, View Helpdesk staff that need access to the view admin manager web page and the vCenter web interface, but nothing else. Go to the grouping objects then security group and make a new security group:

Then let’s pick the user group out from AD that we already selected. Note the required menus to select the user group.

And finish after excluding anything you want to make sure is always excluded from the security group, eg, domain controllers, whatever. If directory group is not an option, you need to check your domain integration from the previous step.

So now that we’ve defined the source and destination, service groups and dynamic user groups to be firewalled, let’s check out the firewall rules that tie it all together with some commentary.

Desktop_Allow_Rules

I put all the block rules last per norms of DAPE ACL ordering. We can see here that rules 1 & 2 are based on NSX_View_Helpdesk_Access has static access to a couple VMs, View, Log Insight and vCenter via HTTPS.

Most of the security groups for the desktops had dynamic membership based on VM name, such as Win7-, but other filters could be used as well such as OS Windows 7, etc.

VDI_Infra_Allow_Rules

Here I specified all the required rules in and out of the VDI infrastructure, including open IP stack from a couple manually specified administrator desktop IP addresses. Notice how nobody even has access to the connection servers except the admins?

VDI_Block_Rules

These rules block any traffic in or out of either desktops or security servers unless specified above.

Results are good and as intended.

We can see that dynamically the user on the VM was picked up and the VM was added to the rule.

Big Picture Lessons Learned

Knowledge of traffic being dropped by the DFW is paramount, otherwise you’re going to HAVE A BAD TIME, lol (Southpark anyone?). Seriously, though, you need to be able to troubleshoot and loosen ACLs for required traffic and find undocumented port requirements like I had to for View, and they have GREAT network requirement documentation. The best way I came up with to find this information quickly is to log all firewall rules, and then leverage VMware Log Insight with the NSX plugin to filter on drops (installs in like 15 minutes). Made it super simple to figure out what ports were being used between two endpoints. Flow monitoring with NSX 6.2 is another great option to use before putting the rules in place to understand different sources & destinations in play.
With NSX 6.1.4, if VMware tools wasn’t running in the VM and vCenter didn’t know the IP address of the VM, none of the DFW rules took effect with the VM selected as the source. Now with 6.2, DFW rules apply whether or not vCenter is aware of the VM ip address. The problem was easy enough to fix with a IP subnet based block catch-all rule, but the point of policy driven access is getting away from static configurations.
If you change user group membership in AD, you must resync the AD deltas from within the vSphere web client for that to take effect immediately.
With NSX 6.2, there is a drop-down option when creating the firewall rules to block traffic in/out of the source destination. I found that to completely block traffic in both directions, two rules were required with source destination reversed.

I would absolutely love to give y’all an export of the rules so you could just import them, but sadly it’s not that easy to import them once the XML is exported. As soon as Tristan Todd’s rumored NSX rule import fling is available, I will post a CSV with all the Services, Service Groups and Firewall Rules so you can start with what I put together and automatically import them.

I hope this was helpful for you guys! Next up, I’ll be introducing security server load balancing with NSX, followed by AppVolumes integration, Trend Micro Deep Security AV and hopefully more.

AppVolumes is the Chlorine for your Horizon View Pools

Actual things I’ve said:

“So, you have 32 different pools for 400 people?”

“So, you have one full virtual for every employee worldwide?”

When I’ve said these things or things like it, I usually get the Nicholas Cage look back, like “DUDE I KNOW…It’s not like I had a choice”

It seems that plenty of folks have had the same problem of pool sprawl due to application compatibility issues, or things they were unable to script or work around. Having been in delivery in the virtual desktop space means that I have seen and lived with the problems of a stateless desktop environment, most of which can be overcome with some time, energy and willingness to script. Most of these obstacles are profile related, and can be easily mopped up with third party tools, but the focus of this post is what happens if we stay inside the VMware product suite without any third party extras. So the main painpoints that remain apart from profile and application setting abstraction are:

What happens if a user legitimately needs to install their own apps, they want it to persist on the local drive for best performance, and they’re already using a stateless desktop?
How can we consolidate as many users into the same desktop pool as possible without application dependency contention?
How can we granularly control and minimize risk during locally installed application updates? Also, how can we do it faster?

What ends up happening to most organizations is that we end up getting bacteria-like applications which cause admins to create separate pools or put a user on a full virtual. The VDI admins often times end up getting torqued at the “fringe apps” that are not central to the core business but still need to run in the virtual desktops. This is usually due to the fact that there are more use cases in a department than are initially guessed. A good example is when a Marketing department is actually 4 different use cases rather than 1 due to crazy one-off app requirements. Along those lines, these are some of the problems I’ve seen with some of the fringe “problem child” applications:

No support for AppData redirection
Large application in size which drives poor performance on network share or when virtualized
Vendor requires locally installed application
Apps that require multiple conflicting dependencies such as verisons Microsoft Office or Office Templates
Apps that require weekly or monthly updates that users don’t want to have to perform only once per interval (and View admins certainly don’t want to recompose for, ugh)
Security requirements that dictate applications cannot be installed for users that need them installed, even if locking them down another way is available.
Countless “one-off” applications that will not virtualize, sequence or otherwise be delivered unless they are locally installed

Let’s take a look at an image from the vmware.com AppVolumes page which clearly illustrates the difference between a locally installed or streamed from the network or remotely hosted application.

While AppVolumes won’t kill the bacteria in your swimming pool, it will most certainly allow you to clean and clear up your View pools and pave the way to a single golden image dream with instant and simple application delivery along with much cleaner and safer update methods with a faster rollback. It will mean that the only legitimate need to create a new pool is for resource differences in the VM containers themselves, and the golden images themselves will mostly likely have no apps installed locally in it. This is absolutely FANTASTIC. Under the covers, what’s really happening is that the applications and settings are being captured to a VMDK which is mounted to the capture machine, then the application is installed to it. It’s sealed, and then disconnected and hot added to multiple VMs simultaneously. The craziest part of this whole method of updating the installed applications means that you almost never have to kick a user out of their VM. However in the software as is, you have to unpresent the AppStack, then re-present the updated version during an update, so it’s a not an entirely seamless AppStack update procedure, but it’s a heck of a lot better than dealing with a recompose that impacts more departments than it needs to due to the use of a COE pool (common operating environment) which I and others preach when using stateless desktops use cases. Once I get some hands on with the product I’ll know more about the update procedure and will write about it for sure, but apparently it’s been a pretty hard to get hands on even for partners.

So what does this mean looking forward? It means that you can crack open a can of Happy New Year 2015, and start fresh. REALLY. Fresh. It’s the opportunity to start with a clean slate and keep it clean as a whistle, while maintaining persistent user installed applications, per department applications, and one off applications. Not to mention if you own Horizon Enterprise, you will get AppVolumes for free out of the gate! Cheers to that!

I’m going to try to start a new App Volumes themed blog post series for those like myself waiting for Cloud Volumes to become GA. The following are some of the topics I’d like to write on. If you’d like to hear one of them, please sound off in the comments, it’s a good source of motivation. : )

Optimize Your Windows Base Image Like a Boss
AppVolumes: Best Practices for AppStacks and Updating
AppVolumes compared with RDSH for One-Off Application Delivery
A Real World Plan for Migrating to AppStacks from Traditional LC Pools

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 2 – View Composer

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 1 – Prepwork

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 2 – View Composer

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 3 – Connection Servers

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 4 – Security Servers

Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 5 – Desktops

Let’s remember from Part one that we first need to do these steps.

Prepare for View Composer Upgrade (As in you’re about to perform the upgrade)

Verify physical requirements are met on the vCenter or standalone machine (Standalone, 2 vCPU 8GB RAM, 60GB Disk, usually recommended, 4 vCPU 16GB memory for vCenter co-located composer)
Disable provisioning on all the linked clone pools
If any pools are set to refresh on logoff, change them to Never.
Grab a copy of all the SSL certs ( at %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter)
Stop the View Composer service and backup the View Composer Database
Stop the vCenter service and backup the vCenter Databases
Snapshot the vCenter and/or standalone Composer VM(s)
Start the vCenter service
Start the View Composer service

Once we have a full backup plan, let’s upgrade View composer.

Remember to budget about 30 minutes of downtime and make sure that all your provisioning and automatic refresh actions are turned off.

I recommend the automatic upgrade of the View Composer database if possible. If you need to migrate View Composer to a different virtual, or change from a co-located Composer to a standalone, make sure to follow the upgrade guide to the letter. That’s outside the scope of this post, since I don’t have to do that in my lab.

Start the View Composer Upgrade by running the EXE we downloaded already (make sure to run as administrator if you have UAC on). And now, WIZARRRD PICTURES!

If you use integrated (AD) authentication instead of SQL auth, you will need to make sure you are logged in as the user who has access to the database.