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Top Ten VMware Virtual Appliances for Security

with one comment

I have reviewed several appliances in the Secure Content and Threat Management and Identity, Access and Vulnerability Managament categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top 20 appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

  • I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
  • I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
  • I also discarded several appliances rated 4 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

S. No.

Virtual Appliance

What is it used for?

Download Link

Average Customer Rating

Number of Reviews

Pricing

1

Stonesoft

Protects Internal Networks from Malicious Traffic in Demanding Virtual Environments

Download

5

0

Free trial with registration

2

Profense Base Web Application Firewall

Web application firewall with automated adaptive learning and HTTP load balancing

Download

5

0

Free Trial, USD 2950 per subscription

Profense Web Application Firewall (ESX)

Web application firewall with automated adaptive learning, load balancing and XML support. PCI DSS and OWASP Top Ten compliant

Free Trial, USD 5950 per subscription

3

FalconStor Virtual tape Library

The only VTL solution that improves the quality and efficiency of tape backup in virtual enviroments.

Download

5

0

Registration 30 day trial

4

WiKID Strong Authentication Server 3.3.8

The WiKID Strong Authentication Enterprise Edition VMware 3.3.8. Support for Google SSO/SAML has been added

Download

5

0

USD 24 per user

5

Altor VF Virtual Firewall

1st Purpose-Built Virtual Firewall

Download

5

0

Free trial with registration

6

HyTrust Appliance Community Edition

HyTrust Appliance provides a single point of control for hypervisor configuration, compliance, and access management.

Download

5

0

Free

7

CensorNet Web Security Virtual Appliance

Total Web Security software for any organisation

Download

5

0

Free Trail, USD 5 per

8

Kinamik Secure Audit Vault v1.1

Provides data integrity protection by centralizing and preserving sensitive data,making it tamper-evident at the highest detail.

Download

5

0

Free Trial, EUR 10,000

9

AEP Netilla SSL VPN

AEP Netilla SSL VPN is a secure application access gateway that enables secure, web browser access to a range of business apps.

Download

5

0

Free trial, USD 1

10

Trend Micro InterScan Messaging Security Virtual Appliance

Comprehensive email security gateway reduces TCO with immediate protection from spam, phishing, malware and data leaks

Download

5

0

Free Trial, USD 19.67 per user

11

Trend Micro InterScan Web Security Virtual Appliance

InterScan Web Security Virtual Appliance applies real-time web reputation, flexible content scanning and powerful URL filtering.

Download

5

0

Free Trial, USD 13.45 per user

12

LinHost Backtrack 3

BackTrack is a penetration testing oriented live CD and is the result of the merger of WHAX and Auditor.

Download

4.5

0

Free

13

Symantec Brightmail™ Gateway Virtual Edition (formerly Mail Security 8300)

Inbound and outbound messaging security, antispam and antivirus protection, advanced content filtering, and data loss prevention

Download

4.5

0

Free Trail, USD 15 per user

14

JanusVM

Internet Privacy Appliance : Encrypts your Internet traffic, hides your IP address, and is easy to setup.

Download

4.5

0

Free

15

SpamTitan

*SpamTitan allows you create a Email Security Appliance for your Gateway

Download

4.5

0

Free hosted trial, USD 395 per subscription

16

gateProtect Virtual Appliance

gateProtect solutions combine state of the art security and network features such as firewalls, bridging, VLAN, single sign-on, traffic shaping, QoS, IPSec/SSL (X.509), IDS/IPS, web filters, virus filters, real-time spam detection and HTTPS proxy in one system

Download

4.5

0

Free

17

Accellion Secure File Transfer – Virtual Appliance

Secure File Transfer Virtual Appliance – secure, economical and easy to use secure file transfer for today’s global enterprises

Download

4.5

13

Free hosted trial

18

Network Security Toolkit (NST) Virtual Machine

Best-of-breed open source network security applications with supporting scripts and a web-based front-end management interface.

Download

4.0

0

Free

19

LogLogic Security Change Manager- Great for Firewall Coversions!

Streamline the design and deployment of network security rules for firewalls, routers, switches, VPN, and IPS’s.

Download

4.0

0

Free

20

Check Point VPN-1 VE (Virtual Edition)

Proven Security for Virtual Environments

Download

4.0

0

Free Trial

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

Written by paule1s

September 25, 2009 at 1:18 pm

Top Ten VMware Virtual Appliances for IT Administrators

with 2 comments

I have reviewed several appliances in the IT Administration and Systems Infrastructure categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top Ten and more appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

  • I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
  • I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
  • I also discarded several appliances rated 4.5 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

S. No.

Virtual Appliance

What is it used for?

Download Link

Average Customer Rating

Number of Reviews

Pricing

1

WebGUI 7.4.25

WebGUI is an open source content management system built to give business users the ability to build and maintain complex web sites.

Download

5

0

Free

2

Opsview 2.12 Virtual Machine – Network and Application Monitoring

Opsview is enterprise network and application monitoring software designed for scalability, flexibility and ease of use.

Download

5

0

Free

3

ShellNet MiniVM

Web Interface for managing Nessus Vulnerability Scans and results

Download

5

0

Free

4

Pentaho BI 1.7 running on CentOS 5.2

Open Source Business Intelligence Suite

Download

5

0

Free

5

up.time

up.time allows you to monitor, measure and manage your physical and virtual IT infrastructure from a single centralized console.

Download

5

5

$695 per license

6

Profense Professional Web Application Firewall

Web application firewall with automated adaptive learning, load balancing and XML support. PCI DSS and OWASP Top Ten compliant

Download

5

0

Free Trial, $5950 per license

7

FalconStor Virtual tape Library

The only VTL solution that improves the quality and efficiency of tape backup in virtual enviroments.

Download

5

0

Registration 30 day trial

8

Replify

Virtual WAN Optimization Controller

Download

5

0

Free Trial

9

Allardsoft Secure File Transfer Virtual Appliance

The AllardSoft Secure Filetransfer Appliance allows you to send very large files securely using a standard web browser.

Download

5

5

Free trial, $79 per license

10

FOG – Computer Cloning/Imaging solution Server (0.27)

FOG is a computer imaging/cloning solution with many advanced features includes web gui and client service.

Download

5

0

Free

11

AS Communication Gateway

High-Class scalable anti spam solution from small business to enterprise. Developed in Europe/Austria

Download

5

0

Free

12

X-M0n0wall v1.235

*Most popular Firewall appliance* All-in-one firewall package upgraded with VMXnet, heartbeat and MUI-control.

Download

4.5

0

Free

13

rPath Port 25 Mail Server Appliance

Mail Server appliance

Download

4

0

Free

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

Written by paule1s

September 23, 2009 at 3:16 pm

How To expand your vmdk file

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What should you do when you run out of virtual disk space and have to expand it? Here is an iinsightful article that describes the gymanstics.

Written by paule1s

September 23, 2009 at 9:41 am

VMware Appliance Marketplace Ratings Analysis

with 2 comments

During the past week, I was analyzing the recently revamped VMware Appliance Marketplace. My analysis is summarized below:

Salient Statistics

  • 9% are top-rated, i.e., have a Star Rating of 5
  • 41% have a Star Rating of between 3 and 4, i.e., this cluster may be providing the most value to its users, even though it is not top-rated.
  • There is a steep drop-off in the number of appliances that have a Star Rating below 3
  • 31% are unrated, which seems to indicate that a significant majority has been submitted recently
  • Only 3% (40/1227) have Reviews – this is a very small number. The number of reviews have to grow substantially to indicate that a vibrant community, like Amazon.com reviews, has formed here

Transparency

I feel there is a greater need for transparency. What do the Star Ratings mean?

  • Are they correlated with the number of downloads for that appliance?
  • What is the impact of reviews on these ratings?

Beware Star Ratings alone! The following appliance rated 4.5 has 4 reviews, read them and you will know what I mean.

As a member of VMware’s Technology Network community, I will urge VMware to provide greater transparency around how these ratings are computed/awarded. It will greatly help the users understand the ratings system.

What do you think?

Data

VMware Marketplace Ratings

Number of User Reviews

Star Rating

Total for this Rating

% of Overall

14

6

5

4

3

2

1

Total Reviews

5

115

9%

 

 

2

 

 

3

9

14

4.5

40

3%

 

 

 

1

 

 

2

3

4

151

12%

 

 

 

 

1

 

3

4

3.5

158

13%

 

1

 

 

 

 

1

2

3

196

16%

 

 

 

 

 

1

2

3

2.5

64

5%

 

 

 

 

1

1

 

2

2

24

2%

1

 

 

 

 

1

3

5

1.5

13

1%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0

1

87

7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

7

7

0

379

31%

 

 

 

 

 

 

0

0

Total

1227

100%

1

1

2

1

2

6

27

40

Written by paule1s

September 18, 2009 at 6:31 pm

DropBox dedup only in the cloud

with 2 comments

I had observed in my earlier article that DropBox performs de-duplication in the cloud. This would mean that de-duplication is not performed at the client. In order to test my hypothesis, I performed the following experiment:

I first looked at the size of the DropBox folder on Windows and found it to be 1,723,871,232 bytes.

Next, in the DropBox client, I opened the DropBox folder and simply duplicated the contents of the Public folder by copying the 1.68MB file and pasting it as its copy. I looked at the size of the folder once again and it had doubled to 3,446,513,664 bytes.

If DropBox had been performing dedup at the client, then it should have detected the duplicate blocks between the parent and its copy at source and the folder should not have grown in size at all. As a result, my conclusion is that DropBox dedup’s only in the cloud but not at the client.

Wait, there’s more:

I repeated the same experiment on the Mac after deleting the duplicate file. Here’s what I started out with:

Last login: Thu Sep 17 15:30:58 on ttys000
mace1s:~ paule1s$ du -k DropBox
1152 DropBox/Photos/Sample Album
1516 DropBox/Photos
1682636 DropBox/Public
368 DropBox/sharevm
1684880 DropBox

Notice that the total size of the folder (the last line of the listing above) is 1.68GB.

Next, in the DropBox client, I opened the DropBox folder and simply duplicated the contents of the Public folder by copying the 1.68MB file and pasting it as its copy. I looked at the size of the folder once again and saw:

mace1s:~ paule1s$ du -k DropBox
1152 DropBox/Photos/Sample Album
1516 DropBox/Photos
2600140 DropBox/Public
368 DropBox/sharevm
2602384 DropBox

This is very interesting. I had expected the storage requirements to double to 3,369,760 however, they grew by approx. 1GB. What happened to the remaining 682MB? Did the DropBox client truncate the file? If so, why?

Readers, can you shed some light?

Written by paule1s

September 17, 2009 at 5:34 pm

Posted in cloud computing, transfer VM

Tagged with , , ,

Compressed VM file transfer using DropBox

with one comment

I am using DropBox for transferring compressed files including VM’s  between my environment at home, a Mac running Windows XP SP3 in VMware Fusion 2.0.5 and the test machine, a Windows XP SP3 system located in the office lab. Each machines has a DropBox  folder linked to the same account.

Neat product!

I love the simplicity and ease of use. A lot of thought has gone into making the product easy to install, the integration with the host OS (Windows and Mac) is seamless and sets a benchmark for how UI’s for downloadable products should be designed.

Usage model

I compress each file using the Mac’s native file compression and drop into into my DropBox folder. DropBox seems to follow a two-step file transfer process:

  1. It first uploads the file completely from the source DropBox folder to the DropBox folder in the cloud
  2. After the upload is complete, the file is then downloaded from the DropBox folder in the cloud to the destination DropBox folders.

Setup

Speed ratings are from here. I have been able to correlate these speeds with the end-to-end transfer times.

Transfer Type

Speed Rating for my ISP

Observed DropBox Transfer Rate

Upload

120 KB/sec

70 KB/sec

Download

360 KB/sec

210 KB/sec

Near real-time transfer for uncompressed files

DropBox transfers uncompressed files almost instantaneously between the two machines. The files are transferred sequentially and seem to arrive in order. For example,  I transferred a 1.72 GB folder containing 400 photographs and the photos started appearing sequentially 10 – 15 seconds apart.

Compressed files

Compressed files are transferred as a unit, although dedup applies to blocks contained within it. The transfer times are as recorded below:

Original Size

Compressed Size

Upload Time

Download Time

Total Time

4.30 GB

1.6800 GB

6h 40m

2h 12m

8h 52m

2.15 GB

0.6714 GB

2h 27m

0h 48m

3h 15m

1.10 GB

0.2371 GB

0h 56m

0h 18m

1h 14m

Dedup works well with compressed files

DropBox examines the file to be transferred and builds an index of blocks to be transferred. Its de-duplication technology is smart enough to figure out when not to transfer blocks that are duplicates, i.e., have already been transferred before. For example, when I tried to transfer two clones, the first one took a long time to transfer ( a few hours), but the second transfer was very rapid (under five minutes).

Since I am using the free account, I deleted a 2GB VM from my DropBox folder in order to begin my next transfer. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the next VM transfer was very rapid. I suspect this was because the VM that was transferred earlier was still residing in DropBox’s cache even though I had deleted it, so that DropBox discovered common/duplicate blocks and did not upload them from my Mac.

Summary

Nifty tool. Love it. Will use it a lot.

A few feature requests

  • Subfolders: I would like to organize the files by date and category.
  • Timers: I would like to time the uploads and downloads easily.
  • Profile my usage and suggest how long an end-to-end transfer will take
  • Speed up compressed file transfers – improve my effective transfer rate  from ~60% to ~80%- I would like to saturate the available bandwidth for uploads and downloads

Thanks :-)

Written by paule1s

September 13, 2009 at 5:42 pm

gzip vs dedup: I shrink, therefore I am

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[reposted from rosensharma.wordpress.com]

I stole “I shrink, therefore I am” from my wife’s good friend Arun Verma, who is incredibly creative, and makes some of the best lamps ever. He also does websites and ads if you are interested.

I have a macbook and use vmware fusion to run a windows XP VM. I keep all my data on a hosted folder on the mac’s operating system. So the VM is basically programs and user settings. In addition I have several images which I work with: Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Win 2K3 etc. Not atypical of someone who either develops or tinkers with technology.

My problem is that out of a 120GB hard disk, I am upto 100GB, and a whopping 60GB of that is virtual images. I have about 8. So I wanted to see if I could compress the virtual images in some fashion. I decided to run a small test of how much dedup would buy me over gzip

w2k3.vhd: Original size: 1.6GB
w2k3.vhd.gz: 712 MB

Further Analysis of the image showed that there were
14K Zero Filled Blocks, and
About 40K blocks occurred more than once

So an in-image-Dedup Optimization: 14K + 40K blocks ~ 200MB
Next I added a windows XP image:
wxp.vhd: 2GB
gzip wxp.vhd –> 921 MB
23K Zero Blocks
43K Additional Blocks Repeated between this and previous image
Dedup Optimization: 66K*4K ~ 250MBClearly gzip would win over a simple dedup. Even with two images xp and w2k3 I guess there are just not enough blocks to make dedup shine. Less than 10% of the blocks are being found. Cloning in some sense avoids large matches in a small set of images like on the desktop.
So the obvious next question was well how about dedup + gzip. Here things got a little more interesting:
gzip + dedup on w2k3.vhd: 720 MB (yes larger than just gzip)
gzip + dedup on wxp.vhd: 963 MB (also larger than gzip)
I was not expecting it to be larger. The raw file is not, but if you add the metadata you have to keep for the blocks, it begins to add up. Its close to gzip + metadata. Which means that gzip does a pretty good job with zero filled blocks and also the repeated blocks.
PS: Blocks in this context are 4K

Written by RS

September 10, 2009 at 10:39 pm

Virtual disk (VM) transfers in the cloud

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VM Transfer workflow

There are two sets of use cases:

  1. Within a development team
  2. Within IT

Development teams:

Developers carry between one to three VM’s on their laptops. They often transfer them to other developers/QA Engineers in their own team, or other teams for integration testing.

IT (regular file transfer, no streaming):

IT receives a VM that is packaged and ready for deployment – either developed by an in-house/contracting application development team, or buys it from an external vendor.

The VM is transferred to a staging (pre-production) fileshare from which it can be loaded on to one or more test servers.

When the app within the VM passes acceptance tests, it is transferred to a production fileshare, from which it can be loaded on to one or more production servers.

The VM can also be transferred to archival storage.

Written by paule1s

September 9, 2009 at 9:57 pm

Cloud Flavors

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cloud flavors

1) Software as a Service (SAAS)
Salesforce.com (sales application)
wush.net (svn)

2) Platform as a Service (PAAS)
a) Java
Google App Engine
b) Rails
Joyent
Heroku
EngineYard
c) Python
Google App Engine
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonHosting
d) .net
Azure

3) Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)
Amazon EC2

Written by RS

September 5, 2009 at 7:29 am

Posted in cloud computing

Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

vmworld 2009: esx backup and recovery

with one comment

I walked into a session by Chris Wolf @ Burton Group by mistake. I was looking for Trend Micro’s session on securing virtual environments. So here I was deciding whether to leave or not … and I noticed that the room was full and more people trickling in. Wow for backup? We know its important, but isnt it a solved problem?

Chris seemed very knowledgeable about the topic! The audience was taking copius notes. I was sitting there stunned. Here we enterpreneurs are thinking of the next big thing, most of these folks are struggling with basic stuff. In addition I learnt the following:

- A show of hands for how many people are running ESX vs ESXi had 20% with ESXi, which Chris claimed was very high!

- A lot of people were using vRanger for backing up (vranger was from visioncore acquired by quest software)

- There is no equivalent for VSS for linux. This makes doing backup for linux very difficult for linux guests. How are all those people backing up linux machines on EC2?

Written by RS

September 4, 2009 at 6:04 am

Posted in Uncategorized