05.05.09
HyTrust Appliance: Community Edition
Today, HyTrust is releasing the Community Edition of their HyTrust Appliance. The HyTrust Appliance comes in two different formats: a physical appliance and a virtual appliance. Either gets inserted between your administrative users and your virtual infrastructure (see my earlier post for more details).
The HyTrust Appliance Community Edition is a full-featured virtual appliance that allows you to manage up to three ESX hosts. This is a great way for smaller organizations to gain the benefits of centralized authentication, consistent security configuration, and greatly enhanced auditability. It also gives organizations of all sizes the chance to “kick the tires” on the product to see if it fits their needs. All of this in a totally FREE product (well, you do have to register…).
Quoting from the Press Release:
Pricing & Availability
HyTrust Appliance, Community Edition is now available for download now as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community. To join the community free of charge, go to http://www.hytrust.com/community/register. Support for Community Edition is provided by the Community via online forum participation and direct community member interaction.
This is a great opportunity – join the HyTrust Community and download the HyTrust Appliance Community Edition today. It will simplify your life, no matter how small (or large) your environment!
KLC
04.20.09
The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 6
OK, so the count is up to five posts on vSwitches. If you’ve not read these posts, I recommend that you go back and do so now. The first five posts were:
- The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 1
In this post, I discussed vSwitch functions, Port Groups, VLAN tagging/trunking, valid communications paths, and some other basic vSwitch information. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 2
In Part 2, I covered the vSwitch security features (Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Change, and Forged Transmits) as well as network traffic shaping options. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 3
Here I discussed the various load balancing options that are available in a VMware vSwitch. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 4
In Part 4, I covered fault detection and the Cisco Discovery Protocol. - The Great vSwitch Debate – Part 5
In Part 5, I talked about the various networks that you have to contend with in an ESX environment as well as an approach to help in deciding which networks to combine, if you have to.
Now, in Part 6, we finally start talking about host configurations! I started a thread over on the VMTN Community forums for people to provide input about content they would like to see in this series. VMTN user RobVM asked about a configuration with eight pNICs and iSCSI connectivity, so I’ll tackle that first. But before we do, let me lay some ground rules: Read the rest of this entry »
04.06.09
HyTrust Appliance
I had the pleasure of having Eric Chiu and Ken Crandall of HyTrust (http://www.linkedin.com/companies/hytrust & http://www.hytrust.com/) give me a pre-release demo of their soon to be released product, the HyTrust Appliance. I hesitate to call the device a “security appliance”, although it is – and much more. My take on the HyTrust Appliance is that it is a device (either a physical hardware appliance or a VM appliance) whose goal, at a high level, is to provide a centralized point for administrative access to your VMware Infrastructure components. Why would you want such a thing? Here are four good reasons: Read the rest of this entry »
