Centralized RBAC Missing from Virtualization Management Tools

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to several virtualization and performance management tools from vKernel, NetApp, Solarwinds, Embotics, and a company still in stealth mode. With all these tools and products I noticed that each were not integrated into the roles and permissions of the underlying hypervisor management servers such as VMware vCenter, Citrix XenConsole, or Microsoft System Center. This lack of integration implies that a user with one set of authorizations just needs to switch tools to gain a greater or even lesser set of authorizations. This is not a good security posture and in fact could devolve any security to non-existent.

Virsto gets $12 million boost to help push virtualized storage beyond Hyper-V

Virsto announces a $12 million in Series B venture capital funding and acquisition of EvoStor, a company specializing in storage virtualization technology for VMware environments. Virsto hope these factors will combine to help them transform virtual machine storage and move their Virsto Virtual Storage Engine beyond Hyper-V.

VirtuAll User Environment Manager Released

About 18 months ago fellow Citrix Technology Professional Pierre Marmignon realized that there was a gap in the market for a simple robust user environment management solution that could remove the continual nightmare of managing complex Windows logon scripts and user environment settings in virtual desktop environments. Skip forward to today and Pierre has just announced the release of VirtuAll User Environment Manager (VUEM), and it is excellent.

Security of Performance and Management tools within the Virtual Environment

The problem is that not everything is as black and white as security folks desire. If we implement performance and other management tools, we often need to expose part of our all important virtualization management network to others. But how do we do this safely, securely, with minimal impact to usability? Why do we need to this is also another question. You just have to take one look at the Virtualization ASsessment TOolkit (Vasto) to realize the importance of this security requirement. But the question still exists, how do you implement other necessary tools within your virtual environment without impacting usability?