What is Nutanix Flow.
How Nutanix Flow works
The brain of the solution is in Prism Central and the policy enforcement is done by OVS. In Prism Central you define policies, rules and categories. Security Administrator does grouping applications and VMs via categories. Categories are logical groups for either VMs or applications. Security policies map to categories.
Nutanix Flow – policies, categories and groups mapping
Rules are pushed from Prism Central –> CVM –> AHV –> OVS. Rules enforcement is done by OVS (networking component installed on every AHV host) and applied on virtual machine vNIC.
Nutanix Flow requirements:
- Prism Central 5.6
- 32GB RAM
- AOS 5.6
- AHV only
- All hardware platforms
How to enable Nutanix Flow
Go to Prism Central –> click on question mark (top right corner) –> from menu choose Microsegmentation
Nutanix Flow
On next screen click checkbox – Enable Microsegmentation
Enable Nutanix Flow
After few seconds, microsegmentation is enabled and ready to implement security policies, group apps and VMs into categories.
Log off and log back in to Prism Central. From main dashboard, click Explore and from left panel choose Security Policies
Nutanix Flow – security policies
To get to the this point with Nutanix Flow, shoudn’t take longer than 2h assuming you have to deploy Prism Central 5.6. Now, imagine how long this may take with other products on the market like NSX, vArmour and so on.
