Where are my NOC Views: Virtualization Management Vendors

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to many third party management tools. In the past I have been given briefings as well on various VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen Management Tools as well. Many of these tools are marketed directly for use by the administrator, but they have the tools can be used by more than the administrator. These tools should be marketed to management, administrators, as well as the network operations center (NOC). We need tools that perform continual monitoring and auditing so that we can know as soon as possible when a problem occurs.

Improving PaaS Security: Get your Developers Involved

The 6/16 Virtualization Security Podcast started as a twitter conversation with a comment about PaaS Security where James Urquhart, Krishnan Subramanian, Rich Miller, and myself went back and forth about PaaS security and the role of the developer. It was not quite a DevOps conversation but pretty close. Rich could not join us on this Podcast but hopefully will make a future one. PaaS security appears to be dependent on two things, the provider’s security, and how it is used.

Xen Founders Leave Citrix to Tackle Cloud Security Woes

At Citrix Synergy 2011 in San Francisco last month Simon Crosby made the case that the biggest barrier to the adoption of service-provider offered cloud services is the understandable lack of trust on the part of enterprise customers. Well it looks as if he and fellow Xen luminary Ian Pratt have decided to do something about that lack of trust and are moving on from Citrix to address the problem at its source. Ian and Simon announced today that they are both leaving Citrix and taking key roles along with with Gaurav Banga (the creator of Phoenix Hyperspace) as co-founders of cloud security start-up Bromium.

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.

Citrix announces IaaS Project Olympus built on OpenStack

One of the most intriguing names that has hitherto been at the periphery of the OpenStack initiative is Citrix. Up until last week, Citrix’s contribution was to ensure OpenStack ran on XenServer. However, this week at it’s Synergy event, Citrix made some more sigificant announcements about Project Olympus, through which it aims to provide (in collaboration with Dell and Rackspace) a route to commercial exploitation of the OpenStack codebase. For some time I have been perplexed as to what Citrix is doing. Are they genuinely intending to enter this space? Is this the real play or is it a spoiler?