Windows 2012 Hyper-V – the hypervisor for your Cloud? Part III

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V in your private cloud, specifically in a Microsoft Windows VM environment, can be delivered for cost effectively. With 2012 Hyper-V, any Microsoft edition has the exact same virtualization and fail-over clustering features & scalability. The key market play here is in the increased functionality that Microsoft has introduced however, Microsoft not only have to convince embedded and seasonsed VMware houses to move to a new release, but to convince those who saw Hyper-V in 2008 and 2008R2 that the product has a viable business maturity.

SAML to the Rescue: vCenter Single Sign On

VMware vCenter 5.1 implemented a new security feature, Single Sign-On (SSO), that uses the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to exchange security tokens. This combats an extremely well known and prevalent attack within the virtualization management trust zones: SSL Man in the Middle (MiTM) attacks. However, vCenter still supports the old SSL methods as well for backwards compatibility and to allow management when SSO is not in use. However does this change how we look at virtualization and cloud management security best practices? Is this a launch point for implementing other authentication techniques?

A Secure Cloud Framework for Non-Clouds

Is it possible to use a Cloud Framework to better secure your datacenter? Does cloud technologies provide a secure framework for building more than just clouds? We all know that virtualization is a building block to the cloud, but there may be a way to use cloud frameworks to first secure your datacenter before you launch a private, public, or hybrid cloud. In essence, we can use tools like vCloud Director to provide a more secure environment that properly segregates trustzones from one another while allowing specific accesses.