Adding firewall rules to ESXi 5.5

I needed to add a custom firewall rule to my ESXi box, so that it could send email notifications.

Firstly, I created an smtp.xml file (see below) and this is stored on one of my datastores (in my case /vmfs/volumes/datastore2/hp/).

To make this persistent across reboots add the following lines to:

/etc/rc.local.d/local.sh

cp /vmfs/volumes/datastore2/hp/smtp.xml /etc/vmware/firewall/
chmod 444 /etc/vmware/firewall/smtp.xml
esxcli network firewall refresh

Content of smtp.xml:

<ConfigRoot>
  <service id='1000'>
    <id>SMTP_Outbound</id>
    <rule>
      <direction>outbound</direction>
      <protocol>tcp</protocol>
      <porttype>dst</porttype>
      <port>25</port>
    </rule>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
    <required>false</required>
  </service>
</ConfigRoot>

To add a cron job see this post