Securing and keeping up server environments is tedious enough, but what about all these virtual machines that are popping up all over the network? Blue Lane, which I’ve talked about in the past - here and here, might have found a cure for all those VMs wreaking havoc within your network.

Virtualization compounds the problem of server vulnerabilities

What makes virtual machines more susceptible to vulnerabilities? Once the underlying framework is installed, it allows for instant server creation. That in itself is a good thing, at the same it leads to unmanaged and “rogue” VMs that have little or no protection. At the same time VMs are by design very dynamic. This means they can easily be moved around or taken offline just to reappear somewhere else. All that makes it difficult to track and to keep up with. In addition, some VMs that are being deployed may run rather exotic server stacks. All kinds of different OS versions and applications are being mixed up, this is especially true within testing and QA environments. Again, making it almost impossible to keep up with the never ending stream of security patches.

Seamless integration with the VMware Hypervisor

Security patches = biggest pain point

Blue Lane thought about this problem and according to Allwyn Sequeira, Senior Vice President of Product Operations at Blue Lane: “When we started to talking to VMware they immediately saw the value in providing a solution for one of their biggest pain points - security patching.” Months of collaboration and talking to customers seem to have paid off.

Full integration with VMware

Blue Lane’s latest solution - VirtualShield - is software based and sits directly between VMware’s hypervisor and the actual virtual servers. It will work with all VMware ESX 3 enviornments. The great thing about that is that the administrators have complete control and protection for their entire virtual environment. VirtualShield protects by default any new VMs that may come online through its built-in discovery mode. Since all of Blue Lane’s protection is done inline it will not interfere with any application or protocol that’s being used on the server.

Bottom line: If you have any concerns about securing your VMware infrastructure you might want to take a closer look at VirtualShield.

Blue Lane offers a free 45-day trial through their website. The price for the software starts at $499 per instance of ESX Server 3 on a two-cpu system.

Additional Information:
Virtualization: The Beginning of the End of Static Security (By Greg Ness, VP of Marketing Blue Lane)
Securing Virtualized Infrastructure (Issue Paper by Nemertes Research)

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