One thing I have learned in the time I have spent working in IT is that no software product, out of the box, will do everything that you want it to do. This especially goes for VMware’s vCenter Server. This is a great product but yet still has its shortcoming. vCenter will perform a lot of the tasks that we need to do and has the ability to report on a information we need to know about in our virtual environments but unfortunately not everything we need to know about can be easily found in bulk about multiple servers.
TVP Tag Archives
Security Health Checks
Security baselines and security health checks are an important part of any modern day infrastructure. These checks are done periodically throughout the year, usually ever quarter. In my opinion this is a good thing to check and make sure your security settings are following the guidelines that the company has set out to achieve. Here is where I do have a problem. When setting up the guidelines for the different technologies in your infrastructure it would make the most sense that the people establishing the guidelines need to fully understand the technology they are working with. After all, would you really want the midrange or mainframe group to write the policies and guidelines for the Microsoft Windows Servers in your environment?
Eucalyptus/Terracotta a scalable Java Cloud Platform?
We recently received a presentation on a combined solution from Eucalyptus and Terracotta. Initially we were suspicious because they clearly share an investor – Benchmark Capital. Was this a PowerPoint integration dreamt up by two Venture Capitalists over a power breakfast? However, the combined solution was presented by some very plausible techies with a real-live demo and does look as though it starts to provide a generally-useful abstraction over which to deploy scalable applications (specifically Java stacks), and it too works with commodity hardware. It’s not as slick as the 3Tera solution, more of a command-line approach, but it potentially has the edge in scalability.
Cisco – VMware – NetApp an Interesting Approach to Secure Multi-Tenancy
The Cisco-VMware-NetApp (CVN) was discussed on the Virtualization Security Podcast as it pertains to Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT). This is a major concern that was also discussed at RSA Conference 2010 within the Cloud Security Alliance Summit. The question still remains how to achieve this goal however. CVN is a very good start, but as we discussed on the podcast is missing some key elements.
Rethinking vNetwork Security
Brad Hedlund of Cisco asked the question, should the physical network security policy be different than the virtual network security policy? The answer is obviously no, but why are they treated separately? I and other have pushed the concept that to gain performance, redundancy, and security that you should use multiple network links to your virtualization host to separate traffic. However, does this really give you security?
Bring Your Own Computer Model to Reinvent the Corporate PC?
Can your businesses increase productivity and save money by implementing a Bring your own Computer (BYOC) program? Are there benefits in giving staff a free choice of PC technology (be that a Windows, Mac, Linux, or other devices – perhaps even an iPad) if you give them a cash allowance to purchase and use their own PC for company and personal use? Are there pitfalls?