Cisco SDWAN: Service Chaining, Firewall Insertion

During this post we’ll implement service chaining, firewall insertion.

Service Chaining

Services such as firewall, load balancer, and intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) are often run within a virtualized environment, and they may physically be centralized in one location or in several locations for redundancy.Services may be internal, cloud based, or external subscriptions. Networks must be able to reroute traffic from any location in the network through such services. Customers want the ability to internally spawn or externally subscribe to new services on demandβ€”for capacity, redundancy, or simply to select best-of-breed technologies. For example, if a firewall site exceeds its capacity, a customer can spawn new firewall service at a new location. Supporting this new firewall would require the configuration of policy-based, weighted load distribution to multiple firewalls.
Following are some of the reasons to reroute a traffic flow through a service or chain of services:

  • Traffic flow from a less secure region of a network must pass through a service, such as a firewall, or through a chain of services to ensure that it has not been tampered with.
  • For a network that consists of multiple VPNs, each representing a function or an organization, traffic between VPNs must traverse through a service, such as a firewall, or through a chain of services. For example, in a campus, interdepartmental traffic might go through a firewall, while intradepartmental traffic might be routed directly.
  • Certain traffic flows must traverse a service, such as a load balancer.

How it works

The following figure illustrates how service chaining works in the Cisco SD-WAN solution. The network shown has a centralized vEdge hub router that is connected to two branches, each with a Cisco vEdge device. The standard network design implements a control policy such that all traffic from branch site 1 to branch site 2 travels through the vEdge hub router. Sitting behind the hub router is a firewall device. So now, assume we want all traffic from site 1 to site 2 to first be processed by the firewall. Traffic from the Cisco vEdge device at site 1 still flows to the vEdge hub router, but instead of sending it directly to site 2, the hub router redirects the traffic to the firewall device. When the firewall completes its processing, it returns all cleared traffic to the hub, which then passes it along to the Cisco vEdge device at site 2.
servicechainingworks

Do you want to know more about Service Chaining? Check this Cisco post!

Topology review and requirements

Let’s review together the topology and the requirements for this activity:
topology

AS-IS
The devices that are located in Site-10 are able to talk with all the other devices on the network (both VPN-10 and VPN-20, thanks to route leaking ). This is an important step, keep in mind that we already have a Centralized Policy applied!
The spoke-to-spoke communication works fine and there is no extra hop in the path.

  • Traceroute from router-10 (10.0.0.10) to router-20 (10.0.0.20) and vice versa
    from10to20
    from20to10

  • Traceroute from router-10 (10.0.0.10) to router-30 (10.0.0.30) and vice versa
    from10to30
    from30to10

  • Traceroute from router-20 (10.0.0.20) to router-30 (10.0.0.30) and vice versa
    from20to30
    from30to20

Now let’s review the omp route table from vEdges points of view:

  • vEdge-10 omp routes to 10.0.0.30/32 (Router-30 looback0)
    initialomp10to30
    Next TLOC IP is 7.7.7.31 (vEdge-31) and 7.7.7.32 (vEdge-32)

  • vEdge-31 omp routes to 10.0.0.10/32 (Router-10 looback0)
    initialomp30to10
    Next TLOC IP is 7.7.7.10 (vEdge-10)

  • vEdge-32 omp routes to 10.0.0.10/32 (Router-10 looback0)
    initialomp30to10
    Next TLOC IP is 7.7.7.10 (vEdge-10)

Requirements
The traffic from Site-10 to Site-30 and vice versa must go through the “firewall” located on Site-20. I configured the Loopback1 into Router-20: 2.2.2.2/32 in order to replicate the firewall.

In this lab we’ll consider Site-20 as “Hub”, and sites 10 and 30 as “Spoke”

Disclaimer
I’m using the following release: 20.3.5
If you are not confident about the procedure, test it in your lab environment before applying changes in production.

Configure Service Chaining

First, we need to create the service and propagate it from vEdge-20. I assume that you already have all the VPNs up & running πŸ˜‰

  • Feature Template - VPN 0
    Configurations>Template>Feature>Name of your Feature Template related to VPN-20 (in my case it’s TF_VPN-20) featuretemplate

Configure Centralized Policy

First, click on we need to create Groups of Interest, AKA List.

  • VPN List
    Custom Options(centralized policy)>Lists>VPN>New VPN List: Here we need to define the VPN that will use the Service [VPN-10]
    vpn_list1

  • Site List
    Custom Options(centralized policy)>Lists>Site>New Site List: Here we need to define the Sites that will use the Service [Site10 and Site30] vpn_list1

Now, using the Custom Options, create the Custom Control:

  • Custom Options(centralized policy)>Topology>Add Topology>Custom Control(Route & TLOC)
    custom_route1

Here we need to specify the following parameters:

  • Name: VPN10_FW_Ins_From_Site20
  • Description: Firewall insertion from Site-20 (2.2.2.2/32) to VPN-10
  • The Site IDs.
  • The VPN ID.
  • Change the default action from reject to accept.

Click on “Sequence Type” and choose “Route”
sequence_route11

Click on “Sequence Rule” and choose “VPN” (the first one refers to VPN List, the second one refers to VPN ID) and “Site”. In this example we’ll choose “VPN-10” as VPN List and “SITE-10_30” as Site List, here is the configuration:
sequence_route12

Then, in the “Action” section change it from “Reject” to “Accept” and choose “Service”. Here we need to select the “Firewall” as Service Type with VPN ID 20 and click “Save Match And Actions”:
sequence_route13

The final step is to modify the default action from “Reject” to “Accept”:
default_action1

You can now press the “Save Control Policy” at the bottom of the page πŸ˜‰

Perfect, now we need to create/compose our policy. In our topology we already have a Centralized Policy applied and it’s fundamental for us because it allows the communication between VPN-10 and VPN-20 (Policy called “VPN_Leaking_10_to_20”).
Copy the policy and create the new one called:

  • Policy Name: VPN-Leaking_FW-Insertion
  • Description: VPN Leaking between VPN-10 and VPN-20 + FW Insertion from Site-20 VPN-20

copy_policy

Now let’s edit this new policy (VPN-Leaking_FW-Insertion):
edit_policy

Edit Policy>Topology>Add Topology>Import Existing Topology:
edit_policy2

Perfect, now choose “Custom Control (Route and TLOC)” and select the Custom Control policy that we created:
import_customcontrol

Ok, now go back to “Policy Application” and both the “Site List” and the “Direction”:
site_direction

You can now press the “Save Policy Changes” at the bottom of the page.
Finally, activate it: policy_activation

Verify

Now we need to verify that the policy is working properly. Let connect to vEdge-10 and vEdge-31/32 and verify the next-hop for the router’s loopback:

  • vEdge-10
    vedge10_omp_nexthop

As you can see, from vEdge-10 point of view the next hop for this specific subnet is vEdge-20 and not vEdge-31 and vEdge-32

  • vEdge-31
    vedge30_omp_nexthop

As you can see, from vEdge-31 point of view the next hop for this specific subnet is vEdge-20 and not vEdge-10

  • vEdge-32
    vedge30_omp_nexthop

As you can see, from vEdge-32 point of view the next hop for this specific subnet is vEdge-20 and not vEdge-10

Verify the path using traceroute from Router-10 to Router-30 and vice versa

  • From Router-10 to Router-30
    finaltraceroute10to30

  • From Router-30 to Router-10
    finaltraceroute30to10

As you can see the traffic goes through Router-20 Loopback1, which simulates our firewall!

Congratulations, you did it!πŸ’₯

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Riccardo