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A year in review: What are our readers looking for?

without comments

Our readers are primarily asking questions like:

  • How can I free disk space, on Windows, and on ext4, ext3 on Ubuntu and Linux, within virtual disks like vmdk, vhd and vdi?
  • Where can I find the best virtual appliances/ Top 10 virtual appliances?
  • How can I convert from one virtual disk (vmdk to vhd, or vdi to vhd) to another?
  • Who are the competitors for ec2?

An analysis of the search terms shows interesting clusters:

Serial

Topic

% of queries

Search terms

1

ext4 defragmentation

23%

ext4 defrag, defrag ext4, ext4 defragment, defragment ext4

2

ubuntu ext4 defragmentation

14%

ext4 defrag ubuntu, ext4 ubuntu defrag, ubuntu ext4 defrag, ubuntu defrag ext4, defrag ext4 ubuntu, defrag ubuntu ext4

3

vmware virtual appliance

14%

vmware virtual appliance, vmware virtual appliances, top vmware appliances, top 10 vmware appliances, best vmware appliances

4

virtual appliance

5%

virtual appliance, virtual appliances, top appliances, top 10 appliances, best appliances

5

vmware firewall appliance

5%

vmware firewall appliance, vmware appliance firewall

6

ubuntu defragmentation

4%

defrag ubuntu, ubuntu defrag, defragment ubuntu, ubuntu defragment

7

ec2 competitors

4%

amazon ec2 competitors, ec2 competitors

8

windows 7 virtual appliance

4%

windows 7 virtual appliance, virtual applaince windows 7

9

ext3 defragmentation

4%

ext3 defrag, defrag ext3, ext3 defragment, defragment ext3

10

convert vdi to vhd

3%

convert vdi to vhd, vdi to vhd

If I abstract it out, our readers are primarily interested in learning how to free disk storage and where to find the best / Top 10 vmware, Xen and Windows virtual applainces.

Thank you. I appreciate your interest in this blog.

Top 10 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?

Top 10 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?

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

Cloud Flavors

without comments

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 , , , , , , , ,

DropBox: "Cloud" service for storing, syncing, sharing files

without comments

I found Dropbox, a nifty service for storing files online, keeping their copies on several of your own computers in sync, or sharing some of them with your friends.

  • You download the Dropbox client (supported on Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit), Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+)
  • 2GB of free storage provided with it
  • You can then drag and drop files that you want to store online or share into the Dropbox.
  • Dropbox maintains a snapshot of files
  • If any of the files get updated, it sends only blocks that have changed
  • It also offers the ability to undelete and restore files from the copies that are stored online.
  • You can create Public folders for sharing, files in Public folders have URL’s that you can share with your friends.

While the company seems to be consumer-focused, the service is usable for dull and boring corporate stuff, like instantaneous automatic backups of files that change and also enables disaster recovery.

Someone has used Dropbox for syncing and sharing VM’s. This is an interesting use case, however, readers should pay heed to the transfer times as image sizes grow

Written by paule1s

April 8, 2009 at 12:38 pm

Top 10 referrers for Q1 2009

without comments

Amazon EC2 announces developer toolkit for Eclipse IDE

without comments

I received the email annoucement from Amazon ec2 earlier today:

We are excited today to introduce the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse Java IDE that makes it easier to develop, deploy, and debug Java applications on Amazon Web Services. With the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, you’ll be able to get started faster and be more productive when building AWS applications.

The initial launch of the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse is targeted at Amazon EC2 developers and provides basic management features along with tools for deploying and debugging Java web applications.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, guides Java developers through common workflows and automates tool configuration, such as setting up remote debugger connections and managing Tomcat containers. The steps to configure Tomcat servers, run applications on Amazon EC2, and debug the software remotely are now done seamlessly through the Eclipse IDE.

You can read the detailed announcement here and also download the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

Written by paule1s

March 25, 2009 at 8:03 pm

How credible is EC2’s competition?

with 2 comments

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) is offering over 1500 AMI’s (virtual appliances). It’s recent foray into Europe highlights its aggressive pursuit of a land grab strategy. So, what has its competition in the US been up to? Every major web hosting vendor has announced a cloud initiative:

Amazon’s ec2 is nearly three years old now (Mar 2006) and competition has started appearing on the horizon just over the past year. If you look at the timescale of announcements,

  • Rackspace’s Mosso is just over a year old (Feb 2008),
  • Terremark’s cloud is nine months old (June 2008),
  • AT&T’s cloud is seven months old (Aug 2008),
  • IBM’s AMI launch on ec2 and Savvis’ cloud is three weeks old (Feb 2009).

Since ec2 was first to market, the Rackspace, AT&T and Savvis cloud offerings have a “me too” feel to them. However, unlike other vendors, Rackspace has published pricing on the Web and it appears to be very competitive with ec2. 

Unlike Amazon, Savvis and AT&T are going the buy versus build route to get fast time to market. They are initially launching their service using VMWare technology put together using Professional Services instead of following Amazon’s approach of building a proprietary infrastructure using Open Source software as its foundation. In fact, this may be the preferred route amongst the upper echelons of cloud service providers. There is optimism that providing cloud services is a growth business. I am noticing startups like Enomaly (“Build your own private elastic cloud”) and VMOps (“launch ec2 today”, aka public cloud) offering cloud infrastrcture products.

In conclusion, credible competition is emerging and there are real alternatives to ec2 available today. However, given the state of the economy, I think the market will begin to form by 2010 and should reach critical mass by 2011-2012.

Written by paule1s

March 8, 2009 at 11:03 pm