There is a great debate on which hypervisor vendor works with ISVs and which do not. You have a number of ISVs working with VMware that are just now starting to work with Hyper-V. A number of ISVs that are struggling to catch up in the virtualization space. Hypervisor Vendors that are directly competing with ISVs as well as welcoming ISVs. This story is not about any of this, but about how easy is it to launch a new product for each of the hypervisors available with or without help from the hypervisor vendor. In essence, is there enough documentation, community, and code out there to be interpreted as welcoming ISVs.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
40,000 Firewalls! Help Please!?
While at VMworld I was suddenly hit with a blast of heat generated by the 40,000 VMs running within the VMworld Datacenter of 150 Cisco UCS blades or so. This got me thinking about how would VMsafe fit into this environment and therefore about real virtualization security within the massive virtual machine possible within a multi-tenant cloud environment. If you use VMsafe within this environment there would be at least 40,000 VMsafe firewalls. If it was expanded to the full load of virtual NICs possible per VM there could be upwards of 400,000 virtual firewalls possible! At this point my head started to spin! I asked this same question on the Virtualization Security Podcast, which I host, and the panel was equally impressed with the numbers. So what is the solution?
VMsafe – Vendor Implementations at VMworld
With the advent of existing VMsafe products from Altor Networks, Reflex Systems, and ones on the horizon from Trend Micro and others in the security space, all administrators should have a clear understanding of how they work under the covers. Where does VMsafe appear within the stack? Is VMsafe on the incoming physical NICs, within the vSwitch, portgroups, or before or after the vNIC? Can we expect the other aspects of VMsafe to be the same? While I was discussing VMsafe with the vendors, VMware was also going around and talking to all the VMsafe vendors for VMware TV shots.
Is VMware trying to remake itself? To Compete with Microsoft?
With all the rebranding going on with VMware, I find it interesting that the new logo for VMware is similar to Microsoft’s logo. A single name instead of the cool boxes they used to have. Did VMware’s brand loose its focus while we were not watching? Is this why VMware is rebranding everthing? Is VMware really trying to remake itself to be more like Microsoft?
Disaster Recovery Maturity shown at VMworld 2009
Veeam, Vizioncore, and PhD Virtual all showed there latest released products as well as the future products that integrate with VMware vSphere at much deeper levels that previously available, ala the VMware vStorage API. Talk was also about expanding their products into Microsoft Hyper-V as well as Citrix XenServer. This space has become so important that even the traditional backup vendors such as Symantec (BackupExec) as well as HP (DataProtector) are getting into the act. This shows ecosystem as well as market maturity not seen at last years VMworld.
VMworld 2009 San Francisco
TVP was at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. While there we we published a running dialog on a forum that has since disappeared. Look for our twitter streams at a future VMworld!