In addition to VMwareβs announcement that vSphere 4 is now generally available, VMware is also pleased to announce that as of May 21, 2009 the vSphere vShield Zones product is also generally available.Β VMware vShield Zones 1.0 offers the following key features and benefits for vSphere 4 environments:
Sunday, May 24. 2009
The vSphere vShield Zones Product
Central Management of Logical Zone Boundaries and Segmentation
- Leverage existing virtual infrastructure containers β hosts, virtual switches, VLANs β as logical trust or organizational zones
- Define policies to bridge, firewall, or isolate network traffic between zone boundaries
- Manage and deploy policies across entire VMware vCenter Server deployment
- Integrate with VMware vCenter Server and automatically deploy on existing virtual networks
- Scan and discover existing applications running on virtual machines to identify application protocol
Network Enforcement and Flow Monitoring
- Classify traffic by network or application protocol (e.g. HTTP, RDP, SNMP)
- Performantly filter traffic with stateful packet inspection (SPI)
- Track dynamic port connections for protocols such as FTP
- Track network connections across VMware VMotion migration events.
- Easily convert observed network flows into precise network enforcement rules.
- Monitor both allowed and disallowed activity
Management and Reporting
- Access the Web-based vShield Manager interface remotely from any Web browser
- Configure administrators to be common with VMware vCenter Server or distinct for separation of duties and roles
- View activity hierarchically at individual virtual machine or aggregate levels and generate graphical or tabular reports
- Retain log data for archival and compliance purposes
- Export events and data using syslog format
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More information about vShield Zones can be found at the product page here: http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield-zones/
vShield Zones 1.0 is downloadable as part of the VMware vSphere evaluation at: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/index.php?p=vsphere&lp=1
Documentation and release notes about vShield Zones 1.0 can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsz_pubs.html