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>