TVP Tag Archives

Collaborations abound at VMworld 2011

If there was one thing I saw and heard about at VMworld, was the number of third party collaborations that were taking place. While not explicitly stated by VMware at VMworld, the show floor had many different collaborations that were taking place. This level of collaboration shows a level of maturity within the virtualization and cloud vendor ecosystems. A maturity, that shows that the vendors understand the benefits of leveraging other companies to lower their overall costs while producing better and more attractive products. Some of the collaborations I saw where purely the resale of products, while others were integrations between products.

5 Starting Steps to Protect Your Virtual and Cloud Environments

More and more is coming out about the attack from a MacDonald’s that left an organization crippled for a bit of time. The final tally was that the recently fired employee was able to delete 15 VMs before either being caught or he gave up. On twitter, it was commented that the administrator must not have been a powershell programmer because in the time it takes to delete 15 VMs by hand, a powershell script could have removed 100s. Or perhaps the ‘Bad Actor’ was trying to not be discovered. In either case, this has prompted discussions across the twitter-sphere, blog-sphere, and within organizations about how to secure from such attacks.

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.

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?

vCenter Operations: Integrated and Secure?

VMware released 3 versions of vCenter Operations, standard, advanced, Enterprise. We have already discussed the abilities of vCenter Operations vCenter Operations – vSphere Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management with Self Learning Analytics but is this an integrated and secure implementation of monitoring or do we need more security than what is provided?
At the time the first article was written there was a bit of vital information we did not have available to us. That is how to access vCenter Operations Standard or Advanced in a multi-tenant manner, that has now been provided. vCenter Operations Alive functionality can be accessed directly from a web browser using your VMware vCenter Credentials, which allows you to see the Alive status of any VM you have the permissions to view. This capability is a huge capability, as it now allows me to provide a non-vSphere Client mechanism to view the status of the virtual environment.