Users Guide

Table Of Contents
Dell PowerConnect ArubaOS 5.0 | User Guide] External Services Interface | 569
Chapter 30
External Services Interface
The Dell External Services Interface (ESI) provides an open interface that is used to integrate security solutions
that solve interior network problems such as viruses, worms, spyware, and corporate compliance. ESI allows
selective redirection of traffic to external service appliances such as anti-virus gateways, content filters, and
intrusion detection systems. When “interesting” traffic is detected by these external devices, it can be dropped,
logged, modified, or transformed according to the rules of the device. ESI also permits configuration of different
server groups— with each group potentially performing a different action on the traffic.
You can configure Dell ESI to do one or more of the following for each group:
z Redirect specified types of traffic to the server
z Perform health checks on each of the servers in the group
z Perform per-session load balancing between the servers in each group
z Provide an interface for the server to return information about the client that can place the client in special
roles such as “quarantine”
ESI also provides the ESI syslog parser, which is a mechanism for interpreting syslog messages from third-party
appliances such as anti-virus gateways, content filters, and intrusion detection systems. The ESI syslog parser is a
generic syslog parser that accepts syslog messages from external devices, processes them according to user-defined
rules, and then takes configurable actions on system users.
This chapter describes the following topics:
z “Understanding ESI” on page569
z “Understanding the ESI Syslog Parser” on page571
z “ESI Configuration Overview” on page574
z “Example Route-mode ESI Topology” on page583
z “Example NAT-mode ESI Topology” on page588
z “Basic Regular Expression Syntax” on page593
Understanding ESI
In the example shown in this section, ESI is used to provide an interface to the AntiVirusFirewall (AVF) server
device for providing virus inspection services. An AVF server device is one of many different types of services
supported in the ESI.
Note: The ESI feature requires the Policy Enforcement Firewall Next Generation (PEFNG) license installed on the controller.
Note: In ArubaOS 3.x, the only AVF server supported is Fortinet.