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Third Brigade Debuts VM Protection

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Third Brigade recently announced the availability of Third Brigade VM Protection, a free-of-charge software package that complements the security-hardened VMware platform and helps organizations achieve protection and compliance for VMware virtual machines (VMs) that are deployed in private or public cloud computing environments.

This free software provides additional protection for the server on which VMs are running and the applications running in VMs when multiple VMs from different organizations are deployed together on the same server, enhancing VM segregation in service provider environments. Third Brigade VM Protection can be deployed quickly and managed centrally, and is integrated with the VMware platform. Multiple layers of protection are combined in a single software agent to increase security and gain visibility into malicious activity targeting VMs.

Third Brigade VM Protection provides the following benefits to help organizations fully utilize their virtualization environments:

  • Firewall, Intrusion Detection (IDS), Integrity Monitoring and Log Inspection
  • Typical out-of-the box configurations (security profiles) for Microsoft® Windows® and Linux servers
  • Integration with VMware vCenter Server to achieve effective enterprise deployment

Third Brigade VM Protection is available for free for up to 100 virtual machines.

Virtuize Partners With RedHat

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Virtuize, Inc announced yesterday that it has partnered with Redhat, Inc to deliver Redhat’s Virtualization services to its customers. This expands Virtuize, Inc’s Open Source Virtualization portfolio.

Virtuize was formed in 2008 by industry specialists with over 25 years of consolidated experience to specialize in Virtualization and Cloud Computing Solutions.

More information about RedHat’s Virtualization Portofolio is on their site : www.redhat.com

Kemari v1.0 Released

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Last month,TAMURA Yoshiaki from the Kernel Group , OSS Computing Project at the NTT Cyber Space Labs announced the availability of Kemari on the Xen Devel mailing list.

Kemari is an open-source virtual machine synchronization mechanism for fault tolerance. It’s similar to Remus which we covered earlier.

Kemari tries to achieve a fault tolerance setup that does not
require the use of specific hardware or modification of applications.
Kemari aims to keep VMs transparently running in times of hardware
failures. It transfers the state of the primary VM to the secondary
VM when the primary VM is about to send an event to devices such as
storage and networks.
In short it is trying to real time mirroring of Virtual Machine instances.

The, source (Kemari has been released under the GPL) , documentation and different presentations including a Video running both a Linux and Windows demo are available at the Kemari Website

Kemari is listed on Xen Product Roadmap, and is asking for reviews and comments from the community.

We already mentionned Remus in earlier posts here at Virtualization.com and it seems the the Kemari and Remus project are planning to merge in order to to propose a better solution for Xen 3.4 together.

Novell Offers Solution For Workload Management In The “Mixed IT Data Center”

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Novell today announced significant enhancements to its PlateSpin Workload Management solution. The new PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Orchestrate enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. Through these new enhancements, PlateSpin Workload Management is the only solution on the market today to support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As data centers increasingly deploy diverse hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies in heterogeneous environments, the artificial boundaries between physical and virtual machines are being erased by portable workloads – the combination of an operating system, application and data software independent from the underlying physical or virtual platform. PlateSpin Workload Management enables data center administrators to optimize the distribution of workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines. As a result, customers can transform their IT environment into a more efficient and resilient next-generation data center.

PlateSpin Workload Management has added key functionality that makes PlateSpin a critical component of the day-to-day operation of the next-generation data center. PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

IBM Releases Virtual Desktop To Rival VMware View

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IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included. Wall Street Journal calls it a ‘Microsoft-free’ desktop.

This comes off the heels of VMware’s release of View 3.

None of the pieces of the IBM bundle, available immediately, are new, but the bundled solution makes it easier and cheaper for companies to deploy a complete VDI solution on Linux, IBM maintains. IBM’s OCCS includes Lotus Symphony, its implementation of the ODF-based OpenOffice, as well as Lotus Notes and other applications.

Virtual Bridges’ Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment runs about $49 per seat, while Canonical is about $50 per seat. IBM Lotus Symphony is free but the Notes and other applications are priced separately.

NX Announces Virtual Hosting Service Contract for Special Olympics

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INX announced today that it has started its Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for the production IT environment of Special Olympics Northern California.

Special Olympics Northern California (SONC) is like many businesses – too small to cost effectively implement and manage its own data center virtual infrastructure, but too big to ignore the inefficiencies and high costs of maintaining a physical infrastructure. As a result, they turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for their server and desktop provisioning, all of which were converted to virtual machines and are now hosted at INX’s data center facility in Sacramento, California.