VMware just keeps getting better and better all the time. If your company or organization isn't already using virtualization in some form or another then you must consider it. Everything is being virtualized. Literally. And VMware is THE standard for which all others aspire too. Not to knock Oracle VM Server which is awesome on an enterprise level. Xen, Red Hat's KVM and Oracle's Virtual Box are great products too. For small to medium and even enterprise level businesses VMware is the leader in the virtualization industry - aka the Cloud.
VMware VMsafe gives you three ways to better protect your virtual machines through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). You or some company has to create the code (test it, quality check it, etc.)
1. vCompute is an API that provides CPU and Memory inspection before code is executed. Vendors are scrambling to create code for this. I'm sure Symantec, Norton, Sophos will be big players in this market. It'll add an important layer of security as it will be the place where code is inspected for many things BEFORE it is executed.
2. vNetwork Appliance has a DVFilter API that will sit between the vNIC and the vSwitch. It will allow you and security vendors the ability to create network packet filters to insert into the virtual packet stream. VMware vCenter Lab Manager (a cool way to automate transient and cloned VMs) was the first product built to use DVFilter.
3. And for disk block inspection you can write code with the VDDK API. This is a Software Development Kit (SDK) including all the necessary libraries. Who's checking for slack space besides hackers and forensics specialists? There should be software on your systems checking for that. Why not do this at the source storage array (EMC, Compellent, Hitachi, Oracle, IBM, etc.)? I've always preached the idea of pushing functions down to the lowest point in a data flow. Perhaps a VMware product is the place where this inspection takes place.
The problem is the code has yet to be developed, tested, quality checked and made available in beta. While at the same time we DO have access to software that will do similar functions for us today. I still like where this is headed though. Security is all about position, timing and diligence. That's why we architect our network to hide, inspect, filter, and block traffic. VMware is THE place for consolidation today. The VMware admin IS the storage, network and system administrator today. More on that topic in another blog. Timing is all about patching, auditing, hardening before and after the device is put on the network. Diligence is about staying focused on security even when it becomes tedious, expensive and resource depleting.
VMware vSafe is yet another product/layer/utility poised to reinforce VMware as the leader in virtualization. What will they think of next?
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