VMware Discusses vShield Zones and Secure Multi-Tenancy

The Virtualization Security Podcast on 8/5 was all about VMware vShield Zones and how the currently beta version will provide defense in depth, be a lever to achieve Secure Multi-Tenancy, and its impact on the virtualization security echo system. Dean Coza, Director of Product Management for Security Products at VMware joined us to discuss the vShield Zones Beta which consists of 3 parts given names and a nameless third part that was hinted at and we shall see more about at VMworld.

Terminal Services for Mac – OS X gets virtual

The Virtualization Practice’s Presentation Virtualization Comparison Whitepaper discusses PV in relation to business’ application and desktop delivery needs. This updated release adds Aqua Connect’s Terminal Services for Mac Series 3 to those products from Citrix Xenapp, Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect RemoteView, Geniut’s ThinWorx, GraphOn’s Go-Global, Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services, Propalms’ TSE, Quest’s vWorkspace, Systancia’s AppliDis Fusion and 2x ApplicationServer.

Quest + Vizioncore + Surgient = A Virtualization Management Gorilla?

The combination of Quest, Vizioncore and Surgient creates a company that for the first time has all of the management pieces required for an enterprise to be able to virtualize tier one applications and to automate the process of assuring service levels for these applications. This puts Quest in position to be a clear leader in the virtualization management market.

Working with VMware Update Manager Server

Have you ever considered the best way to plan, design and work with VMware Update Manager (VUM)? In the early days using VMware 3.x when VUM was first released, I would end up installing VUM on the vCenter server itself. After all, that was the recommendation from VMware at the time. I propose that this is no longer the case and I would like to present a list of best practices to follow when working with VMware Update Manager. This list came from VMware, but should only be considered as a guide. Each environment is different and your mileage may / will vary.

Virtualization Security Round-up (Updated)

In the End-to-End Virtualization Security Whitepaper we review various aspects of server security with an eye to determining how the products would work together to create a secure virtual environment. While some of these tools are cross-platform, the vast majority of them are geared specifically to VMware vSphere.
In this post we will look at Server Security, and we will follow-up with another post about Desktop Security? Are these very different? I believe so, desktops have daily, second by second user interactions. For desktops, one of the most important aspects is look and feel such as response time for actions. So things need to be as fast as possible. With Servers however, user interactions are limited and therefore have slightly different performance and security requirements. What may be acceptable for a server may not be acceptable for a desktop. So what do the tools provide for servers?

More on OpenStack – Cloud.com, GPL, Citrix, Oracle and the DMTF standards.

Cloud.com had lined itself up with Citrix by using only XenServer in the commercially-licensed version of its IaaS product, and now is being used by Citrix to ensure OpenStack supports XenServer (which it doesn’t at the moment), presumably to keep Red Hat’s KVM under control and VMware out. We’ve also been trawling through the available OpenStack documentation to understand why NASA thinks its cloud is more scalable than Eucalyptus. It seems to be all to do with how the state information is passed amongst the various servers that make up the system. GPL-based Open Core models break down when you move to multi-vendor foundations because the cross-licensing of IPR under GPL immediately infects the recipient codebase, and precludes commercial licensing of the resulting combined work. The result is that the GPL Open Core business model doesn’t work in the same way, and both Eucalyptus and Cloud.com cannot apply their current business model in these multi-vendor foundations. It is a big blow for Eucalyptus. They have turned their biggest potential customer into a massive and credible competitor, built in their own image (only – at least from a PR perspective – much more scalable).

In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external http requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture. In OpenStack the API is implemented in a separate service which translates external HTTP requests into commands across the internal message bus, and so it looks (on the face of it) possible for someone (preferably Oracle) to implement the Oracle DMTF submission as a separable new API server module without disrupting the OpenStack architecture.