Cloud Provider Pod - Get-PodFirewall PowerShell cmdlet
The VMware Cloud Provider Pod Designer produces a bunch of documentation which is really useful (even if you don’t use the Deployer to actually, err… deploy). One of the options in the Designer is to forgo having NSX deployed in the management stack. Instead, we leave a load of dangling VLANs and let you connect them together with your own external network/security stack. The “icing on the cake” would be if you could not only find the network topology in the Designer downloads (which you can), but also the firewall policies necessary to make the whole shebang work (which you can’t).
Fortunately, all the information we need is inside the configData.cfg file in the Designer bundle, but not in a very friendly format. What we need is a slick tool to extract the firewall policy data and present it in a neat way. Sadly, we don’t have that, but what we do have is a PowerShell script/cmdlet that I wrote to do the job instead…