VMSafe

So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Trend Micro, a global leader in Internet content security, has announced a number of innovations in security solutions for VMware virtualized environments which it will debut at the 2008 RSA Conference in San Francisco.

The prototype technology consists of a virtualization security solution that operates in a VMware ESX 3.5 environment, scans for infected machines and remediates any that are found. With this technology, Trend Micro intends to provide greater protection for VMware virtual machines.

Trend Micro is also announcing that its enterprise security products for the endpoint, gateway and server are supported in VMware environments. This enables joint customers to gain the same level of support for Trend Micro products running in VMware virtualized environments as they would on physical hardware.

From the press release:

Trend Micro is integrating the recently announced VMware VMsafeTM APIs into its security technology in an effort to enable channel partners and customers to enhance the security of their VMware environments. VMsafe technology protects applications running on virtual machines in ways previously not possible in physical environments. The VMsafe APIs allow vendors to develop advanced security products that combat the latest generation of malware. VMsafe technology integrates into the VMware hypervisor and provides the transparency to prevent threats and attacks such as viruses, Trojans and keyloggers from ever reaching a virtual machine. The Trend Micro brand of security software will have the ability to run isolated from, and at a higher level of privilege than, the target malware. This will allow offline VMware virtual machines to be scanned and remediated prior to being reactivated.

“While organizations frequently use virtualization to help save energy costs and lower administrative IT expenses, they also have an opportunity to leverage this technology for improved security,” said Punit Minocha, vice president of business development for Trend Micro. “Most security solutions in the market underperform in virtual environments so, together with VMware, we want to help our customers to take advantage of the cost benefits of virtualization and to improve their organization’s security profile at the same time.”

VMware-support for existing Trend Micro products is effective immediately. For a complete list of these products, please visit www.trendmicro.com/go/virtualization. Current VMware-supported products use the existing licensing model. Trend Micro customers who purchase these versions and switch their deployments to VMware can do so at no extra cost or software. This provides customers a choice of running the applications on standalone hardware or on virtual environments, depending on their IT needs. Certain exceptions may apply.

The new Trend Micro technology securing virtualized environments is expected to be available in the second half of 2008.

[Source: SYS-CON]

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