With the general availability of VMware vSphere 4 a few weeks ago, I just wanted to highlight for the security community that VMware vShield Zones is also part of that release and now generally available!

vShield Zones is a new product for VMware and one of the newest members of the vSphere 4 product family, based on technology from our acquisition of Blue Lane Technologies. We had a lot of interest from customers around vShield Zones and had over 200 customers around the world registered for our recent private beta. It is part of the vSphere package starting with the Advanced Edition and above.

VMware vShield Zones 1.0 offers the following key features and benefits for vSphere 4 environments:

Central Management of Logical Zone Boundaries and Segmentation

• Leverage existing virtual infrastructure containers – hosts, virtual switches, VLANs – 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

More information about vShield Zones can be found at the product page here: http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield-zones/ <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 <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 <http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsz_pubs.html>