Today Reflex Systems announced the availability of vTrust™, leveraging the much-awaited VMware’s VMsafe technology which in turn is coming soon in the more-awaited vSphere4. I’ve been a big fan of the Reflex products, and I must say, been so lazy as well to demonstrate their great, VMC, on my blog although it’s been running in my lab for quite some time. I love their Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) that has quite unique features we are missing in our virtual environments today. But the new vTrust comes pretty wild with all the “dynamic policy enforcement” concept and being cloud ready as well.

Quick Highlights from Reflex’s technology section around vTrust:

• Dynamic Policy Enforcement and Management– the ability to specify government regulation, corporate compliance, data center policy, best practice or security rules that adapt and move with the virtual assets (virtual machines, virtual network, group of VMs, hosts, clusters, vLAN, etc.), thus policy is enforced regardless of location, type of network connection, or type of virtual switch
• Policy Extends into the Cloud – vTrust can facilitate and automate the use of cloud and SaaS services by providing a cloud security API that enables enterprises and hosting/cloud solution providers to secure individual virtualization resources in the cloud
• Virtual Segmentation – create virtual trust zones on shared resources by dynamically partitioning the virtual infrastructure into separate virtual resources with different network communication policies (firewall rules)
• Virtual Quarantine – enforce data center policy when VMs are provisioned (VMs must meet certain criteria to be allowed on the network). Easily detect rogue or unauthorized guests or virtual machines which do not meet regulatory or compliance requirements
• Virtual Networking Policies – create and enforce a DMZ, block specific kinds of network traffic between virtual machines (P2P, IM, FTP, etc.), ensure only specific protocols are used on specific ports or networks, etc.

It’s official now, and you are probably flooded at this point with the insane amount of blog posts generated since this morning. I don’t think there is anything possible to add, but what ultimately interest me here is the learning path for the next-gen platform from VMware. This will be your up-to-date guide for the new online presentations, podcasts, webcasts, demos and so forth.

Without further ado, let’s sort them out:

The upgrade path videos from VI3 to vSphere4:
This is your best and first stop in you learning path, these 4 parts videos are very detailed and technical showing you step by step how your upgrade journey will begin and develop:

• Part1: http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part1.html
• Part2: http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part2.html
• Part3: http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part3.html
• Part4: http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part4.html

 Live VMware vSphere Overview Webcasts

• VMware vSphere 4 Unveiled: Get Ready for the Next Generation of IT Services
• Making the Business Case for VMware vSphere
• VMware vSphere 4 Unveiled: Get Ready for the Next Generation of IT Services
• New Cost Savings and Business Continuity Solutions for SMBs with VMware vSphere 4

Live VMware vSphere Technical Webcasts

• Ensuring High Availability with VMware vSphere
• Simplify Network Administration with vNetwork Enhancements in VMware vSphere 4
• Improve Virtualization Management with VMware vCenter Server 4
• How to Upgrade from VMware Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4
• New Performance Enhancements in VMware vSphere 4
• Improve Storage Efficiency and Management with VMware vSphere 4
• How to Upgrade from VMware Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4

VMware vSphere Podcasts

• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 1: Overview  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 2: vSphere Editions  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 3: Platform Efficiency and Performance  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 4: Hardware and Power Efficiency  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 5: Operational Efficiency and Network Management  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 6: Control of Application Availability  
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 7: Control of Application Security 
• What’s New in VMware vSphere Part 8: Control of Application SLAs 

VMware vSphere QuickStart Classes

• VMware vSphere 4 QuickStart Series Part 1: Install and Configure ESXi
• VMware vSphere 4 QuickStart Series Part 2: VM Management with VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere 4 QuickStart Series Part 3: Cluster Setup, Availability and Load Balancing
• VMware vSphere 4 QuickStart Series Part 4: Monitoring, Availability, Back Up and Next Steps

 On-Demand VMware vSphere Webcasts

• VMware vSphere 4 Unveiled: Get Ready for the Next Generation of IT Services
• VMware vSphere 4: The Best Platform for Business-Critical Applications
• New Cost Savings and Business Continuity Solutions for SMBs with VMware vSphere 4
• Improve Storage Efficiency and Management with VMware vSphere 4
• Improve Application Security with VMware vSphere 4
• Integrated Virtual Machine Back up and Recovery with VMware Data Recovery
• Improve Virtualization Management with VMware vCenter Server 4

This is not another article about running Exchange on VMware, well, it’s kind-of, it’s about running Exchange 2007 internally at VMware, the company!

VMware has been releasing lately quite fascinating information about their internal IT operations and infrastructure, one of which just came out today from the incredibly useful VIOPS website. It’s a complete and fine whitepaper VMware released to illustrate how Exchange 2007 has been virtualized and deployed internal at VMware as mentioned above. The most interesting part, for me at least, is that VMware’s infrastructure looks very much like the current infrastructure I work in right now, except that it’s larger in terms of users and servers. I can see that many of the challenges I face right now in my environment, look pretty much similar to the ones pointed out by VMware’s CIO, Tayloe Stansbury, in the last VMworld Europe 2009 session, including both the ERP and Exchange stacks.

That’s enough of a talk today, I will leave you to this beautiful WP to go through, and I really urge you to follow this great VIOPS documents that pop out from time to time with the very detailed and technical information that we all love to read.

The Link once again: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/08Q4_VM_Exchange_Server_2007_VI3_WP.pdf

The word is out, and there is no one better than Chad Sakac to refer to when it comes to EMC and VMware! I’ve just finished viewing the EMC’s compact presentation online and Chad’s excellent details on his blog.
If you are not very patient like me,  you may want to watch this video first to see it physically before going into it’s much details.

EMC’s Whitepapers:

• VI on V-MAX:  http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6209-symmetrix-v-max-vmware-virtual-infrastructure-wp.pdf
• MS-Apps on V-MAX: http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6235-virtual-infrastructure-microsoft-applications.pdf

This is the second video in the vCMA demo, I used BlackBerry emulator to simulate a real-life scenario of a typical VI3 admin spending his day on the beach

Some of the video highlights:

• Search for VMs by names
• Performing some admins tasks on the VMs like Snapshots
• Doing some VMotion magic for migration between hosts
• Exploring the VI3 datacenter, cluster, hosts and VMs
• Running scheduled tasks on the fly
• Analyzing the events and alarms (if any) in the VI environment
• Sending the MOTD from your smart-phone to your VI3 admins.

There was one thing that did not work with me, which is the SRM, for some reason it always hanged and didn’t show anything although my SRM installation is working fine. I’ll revert back with some snapshots if I can get it to work.

Happy Viewing!