TVP Category Archives

Virtualization Backup Security still Missing the Mark

During the Virtualization Security Podcast on 7/8, Vizioncore’s Thomas Bryant joined us to discuss the state of virtualization backup security and forensic use of such backups. In the world of virtualization, backups are performed mostly by 4 distinct vendors: VMware Data Recovery (VDR) and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), Vizioncore vRanger, Veeam, and PHD Virtual Backup for vSphere. Each of these provide the most basic of security capabilities:
* Encrypted tunnels for data movement (SSL)
* Encryption of the backup
But in the increasing global nature of businesses and the difference in privacy laws between townships, states, and the need for Secure Multi-Tenancy, backup companies fall short with their products while making it increasing harder to use backups as a source of forensically sound data.

Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems

PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.

Backup Strategy – Continuous Backup Needed?

I had an interesting conversation with Vizioncore yesterday about how backup is not as much a decision about what software to use but what process to use. In addition, this process needs to be considered from the very beginning of your virtualization architecture. With the quantity of virtual machines being used today by the SMB and Enterprise customers, the backup window has grown to nearly an all day event. What you say? An all day event? My backups happen with the window I set.