Search Results for: virtualization security

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Strategic Roadmap (Including Virtualization)

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe published a blog post earlier today outlining the company’s roadmap in seven areas: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration. Of course, the virtualization one interested us the most:

In 2006, Novell shipped Xen as an integrated part of our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. In 2007, we collaborated with Microsoft to deliver the first cross-platform solution for running Windows on Linux.

At BrainShare, for the first time anywhere in the world, we demonstrated live migration of Windows Server 2008. We had it running as a Xen virtual machine on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers.

Read the rest here.

EMA Research on Virtualization: VMware Still Leading The Pack, Microsoft And Citrix Following Closely

April 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a US-based IT management research and consulting firm, today announced the release of its latest research report titled, “Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts and Recommendations.”

“The promise of IT virtualization continues to be significant as it rightfully gains traction across servers, desktops, applications, networks, storage and more,” said research director Andi Mann. “This latest research report identifies what is really happening within the exploding virtualization marketplace, the impact it is having on IT professionals and the technology options that are available today.”

When looking across all virtualization technologies, Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that VMware still has the highest overall market penetration. However, Microsoft continues to grow its market share and — even before the formal release of Hyper-V — is within 10 percent of VMware’s lead. Citrix also poses a threat, coming in at 20 percent behind VMware, again with major product yet to be formally released.

Mann believes desktop virtualization will show the strongest growth of any virtualization technology during the next one to two years. However, the overall virtualization market will continue to be very healthy because, as this research reveals, enterprises are seeing substantial benefits in cost reduction, server consolidation, security improvement and more from virtualization technologies. The EMA study also clearly shows that virtualization is not just a test and development tool, finding that up to 75 percent of all enterprises are now using virtualization for production use cases — indicating a steady increase in outcomes and confidence since 2006.

As virtualization proliferates, it will continue to deliver many valuable outcomes. However, most companies will face multiple barriers to success. Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that the largest challenges facing successful virtualization deployments lie with “human issues.” Key among these are the unique political challenges that virtualization creates as a result of sharing data center resources, shifting responsibility and functionality of desktops or changing the way departments access applications, storage and networks.

In addition, companies face a potential skills crisis as they find it harder to attract and retain virtualization resources. In fact, enterprises have seen a 25 percent decrease in their ability to manage virtual environments adequately with the skills they have in place.

Complexity is also a critical issue in virtualization. EMA finds that the vast majority of organizations implement virtualization on multiple platforms, using multiple technologies, from multiple vendors — adding multiple layers of complexity onto already complex physical systems. This study also shows convincingly that virtualization will not overtake existing architectures at least through 2010. “For the vast majority of enterprises, virtualization will coexist with physical deployments for the foreseeable future, so complexity will continue to be a major headache,” said Mann.

“The key to success is to approach virtualization as a strategy, not just a series of projects, and to approach it with more realistic expectations,” said Mann, “Companies need to adjust their goals, and find ways to deploy and manage virtualization in more effective ways. This report will help them to do exactly that.”

[Source: The Earth Times]

Windward Expands Virtualization Services, Partners With VMware

April 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Windward IT Solutions, a US-based infrastructure and management systems engineering firm, announced today its certification as a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC). As a VAC partner, Windward provides professional services that transform the leading VMware technologies into powerful solutions.

“Today, organizations must find ways reduce space, power and cooling demands in their data centers, while improving efficiency of applications and increasing the speed of application development and deployment,” said Michael Biddick, executive vice president of solutions. “Windward helps its clients solve these challenges through the design, implementation and management of a virtual infrastructure.”

Egenera BladeFrame Systems Now Come With VMware Virtualization

April 14, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Egenera today announced the general availability of VMware virtualization on Egenera systems with full support from Egenera and its resellers. Under the companies’ original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement announced in 2007, customers can purchase VMware Infrastructure 3 with the Egenera BladeFrame system, a platform designed to support large-scale virtualized deployments of critical applications with high levels of availability and scalability.

The Egenera BladeFrame system combines diskless server blades with PAN Manager software, an infrastructure virtualization product that virtualizes data center infrastructure and delivers a highly available, flexible computing platform. Using VMware virtualization, customers can create and run virtual machines on the BladeFrame system to partition Egenera Processing Blade modules and run multiple OS’s and applications on a single blade.

“VMware and Egenera offer complementary technologies. We’re pleased that customers can now deploy VMware virtualization on the BladeFrame platform with the peace of mind that their investments are fully supported by Egenera,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions, VMware, Inc. “As our relationship grows, we see additional areas for collaboration in managing both physical and virtual assets. We hope to further extend the business value of VMware virtualization and continue providing joint solutions that enable customers to reduce operating expenses, improve business continuity, strengthen security and go green.”

Egenera recently inked an OEM deal with Dell. Dell has agreed to resell and ship Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager I/O virtualization software on its PowerEdge servers by June of this year.

[Source: Marketwire]

Montego Networks Debuts HyperVSecurity Alliance

April 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Montego Networks, which officially launched two weeks ago, has made an announcement at the RSA Conference 2008 about its HyperVSecurity Alliance, an initiative allowing third-party vendors to integrate their products with Montego’s HyperVSecurity technology platform.

The Montego HyperVSecurity vendor-agnostic framework facilitates an interoperable virtual security architecture enabling VM-to-VM visibility, inspection and security, and delivers valuable solutions with minimal network configuration, reliability and performance headaches. For virtualization customers, the HyperVSecurity Alliance provides a flexible, integrated toolkit they can confidently deploy to address needs for virtual security, application performance and investment protection. Through its Alliance, Montego Networks is well positioned to build productive partnerships with vendors of best-of-breed IDS/IPS, patch management, behavioral analysis, anti-malware, network monitoring, and other applications.

The HyperVSecurity Alliance lets its partners rapidly leverage advantages of the Montego platform including fast access to virtual market applications, co-branded lead-generation channel presence & sales. Concurrently, it gives virtualization channel partners a ready-made portfolio of certified products, customer-ready solutions and cross-sell revenue opportunities.

The Charter Members of the HyperVSecurity Alliance include these networking and security solutions providers:

Cyberoam: Unified Threat Management Plus (UTM+)
Lancope: StealthWatch™ for NetFlow and sFlow-based Anomaly Detection and Network Performance Monitoring
Plixer International: Scrutinizer™ NetFlow Analyzer
StillSecure: Commercial and open source secure network infrastructure solutions including NAC, IDS/IPS, vulnerability management and a unified networking/security platform

The Montego HyperSwitch approaches virtualized network security from a new direction that integrates network policy enforcement and access control with a high-availability virtual security switch. This unique approach allows the Montego HyperSwitch to efficiently deliver advanced capabilities including policy-based virtual network partitioning, L2-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, Content Firewall, Virtual Network Discovery, Secure Inter-VM communication, 802.1Q VLANs, 802.1D Spanning Tree, Load-balanced Quality of Service (QoS), Policy-Based Switching, Policy-Based Traffic Mirroring, NetFlow, and more. The HyperSwitch also includes Montego Firewall Control Protocol (MFCP) which enables 3^rd party security vendors to leverage API calls that allow for remote configuration of its security policies.

Lenovo Becomes First PC Maker to Announce Proprietary Client Virtualization Platform (CVP)

April 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Last week, Lenovo announced the first low-level client virtualization software platform offered by any PC hardware manufacturer.

Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) will be the base technology for customer solutions shipping with Lenovo PC products later this year. Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform uses the latest hardware features to isolate applications. These applications provide improved internet security and manageability, while minimizing the impact on performance. At Intel’s Developer Forum in Shanghai, Lenovo made the first public demonstration of solutions based on this technology. Lenovo’s platform uses Intel Virtualization technology to help to bring similar benefits to PC clients with near native performance and full Windows PC experience.

“Our new client virtualization technology underscores Lenovo’s commitment to innovation,” said George He, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Lenovo. “Our leadership in PC virtualization will enable us to optimize PC systems for virtualized applications and give our customers access to more efficient, more stable, and better performing virtualization solutions in the near future.”

“Intel and Lenovo have worked closely on optimizing virtualization for several years,” said Gregory Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Office Platform Division. “By taking advantage of Intel’s Virtualization Technologies, Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform is able to bring new levels of security and manageability to customers.”

[Source: Tarry Singh]