Archives for April 2010

Sourcefire, the creators of Snort and a provider of cybersecurity solutions, today announced the expansion of the Sourcefire 3D System to support the Xen 3.3.2 and 3.4.2 virtualization platforms.

Now supporting the two leading virtual environments – Xen and VMware – Sourcefire is enabling customers with diverse virtual platforms to further protect these investments, while also leveraging these resources to increase intrusion prevention capabilities.

Sourcefire’s Virtual 3D Sensor and Virtual Defense Centre now provide Xen environments with all the functionality originally available for VMware. Users can deploy Virtual 3D Sensors to inspect traffic between two or more Xen or VMware virtual machines, while also using physical Sourcefire 3D Sensors to inspect traffic going into and out of a virtual environment.

With this support for both Xen and VMware, Sourcefire is making it easier to deploy and manage virtual sensors at remote sites where physical resources may be limited, such as retail stores and branch offices, or where little rack space remains in the datacenter. This release also provides additional flexibility to enterprises and cloud computing companies, which rely on a variety of virtualisation platforms to support specific requirements.

The Virtual 3D Sensor provides simultaneous execution of Sourcefire IPS, RNA (Real-time Network Awareness) and RUA (Real-time User Awareness) functions. Customers can deploy the Virtual Defense Centre to monitor any combination of up to 25 virtual or physical 3D Sensors. They can also opt to monitor their Virtual 3D Sensors from the same physical Defense Center they use to monitor their physical 3D Sensors.

FastSoft announced its Desktop Virtualization Acceleration solution earlier this week for remote workers.

It accelerates Citrix Remote Desktop, Microsoft RDP, and other leading thin client applications up to 500%, significantly improving end-user experience and productivity for remote workers. Like other FastSoft solutions, it is deployed on the server side and does not require client software on the remote side, giving FastSoft’s customers fast and scalable deployments.

ReSource Pro, a leading business process outsourcing provider to the insurance industry, has seen a 10% increasing in remote worker productivity using FastSoft’s thin client acceleration solution.

The solution employs FastSoft’s patented FastTCP algorithm developed at the California Institute of Technology. It eliminates long pauses during remote desktop sessions, ensuring that thin clients are not starved for bandwidth and that they recover quickly from packet loss.

It’s been four months since the November 2009 release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the company’s new virtualization product that includes a standalone hypervisor based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and comprehensive server virtualization management tools.

Recently, Red Hat  released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, featuring a range of new capabilities.

The highlights of this release include:

Virtual desktop support
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.

Import and export
With the 2.2 beta release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can now import and export virtual machine images and templates using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). With this feature, customers can more easily move virtual machine images between environments, publish templates or simply create backups of their environment.

V2V : Virtual machine conversion
V2V is a tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machine images into an OVF file for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With V2V incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta, customers are able to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines created in VMware or Xen environments and automatically convert them into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machines. We expect V2V to be extended in a future beta release to support conversion of Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machines images.

Data warehouse
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

Performance
The maximum allowable memory for a virtual machine has been increased from 64GB to 256GB in the beta, which we believe should allow even the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads to be virtualized.

The hypervisor has also been updated to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 kernel with the aim of allowing customers to take advantage of the latest hardware, such as the Intel Nehalem-EX and AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series platform (formerly code named “Magny-Cours”).

Today’s beta also features improved disk I/O performance for virtual machines using thin provisioning or snapshots to deliver performance within a few percent of raw/thick provisioned disks.

All current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta via Red Hat Network today.