VMware adopts BlueLane and it’s “VirtSec” solution
Yesterday David Marshall revealed that the rumors that where already spreading around VMworld in Vegas, are true: VMware has acquired Blue Lane Technologies.
Blue Lane might be known by it’s recently lost Marketing VP Greg Ness but especially by the products ServerShield and VirtualShield. One of the reasons VMware adopted Blue Lane, according to David is:
That Blue Lane’s deep understanding of application protocols allows them to focus on network security from the physical datacenter perimeter, which has become increasingly porous, towards the ‘application perimeter’ – which consists of application-centric security policies based on the logical zoning and partitioning of applications and services rather than machine boundaries.
This might seem like a logical/useful acquisition, but is it? David looks at the matter more closer and raises a couple of very interesting questions. Read the whole story here.
VM-Template best practice
Here are 2 great articles of best practices for creating templates for virtual machines. I’m referring them here as my own bookmarks:
VM Template best practices (Windows)
VM Template best practices (Linux)
One thing I learned is that you already can create thin provisioned disks in VMware ESX 3.5:
vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore/virtualmachine_name/virtualmachine_disk1.vmdk
Big thanks to lraikhman
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3: update older ESX versions with tarball
Yesterday VMware released version 3.5u3 of their flagship product ESX, several new features are appealing for me. In previous 3.5 versions it was not possible to tarball upgrade to those versions; gladly VMware corrected this and with the u3 version it’s possible. To do this follow the procedure in the Upgrade Guide pages 76 for ESX2 hosts and 77 for ESX3 hosts.
This u3 version incorporates a number of other features … Continue Reading
HOWTO deploy ThinApp applications with Active Directory
So our application virtualization comparison chart seems to be very popular. We get a lot of positive responses, but one thing that we get a lot is the fact that we mention ThinApp has no central management for deploying the virtualized apps, and that it can easily be done with Active Directory. Although that is true, we still say that ThinApp has no central management for deploying the apps, just to compare it with other products that do come with a central deployment tool, like InstallFree or Microsoft App-V.
Okay, so how can you distribute ThinApp Applications? There a a lot of possibilities, I will explain 2: through Active Directory and with a login script. … Continue Reading
The 3 waves VMware will be riding, aren’t they forgetting something ?
I stumbled on a nice post on TechStrategyPartners from George Gilbert and Juergen Urbanski. It gives a clear view on which areas VMware will be putting their money on and why. It’s a pretty large piece of reading material and I had a couple of “duh” moments but the core of what they’re telling comes down to this:
We’ve all seen the light concerning server consolidation, it’s (becoming) commodity. So what, at this moment, are the areas where the money is ? According to the authors (VMware stakeholders), VMware has defined 3 waves they are setting out to ride the next period : … Continue Reading
