VM Admins
Virtualization has gone mainstream, with many companies increasingly moving production applications into virtual servers. By consolidating computing into fewer physical devices, this move to virtualization provides dramatic savings while increasing availability and flexibility.
Virtual machines communicate with one another over virtual networks. This opens up gaps in traditional physical network analysis and security. Administrators of virtual servers need purpose-built tools capable of seeing, securing and analyzing virtual network traffic in order to lock-down, troubleshoot and audit their systems. The Altor VF virtual firewall combines security, monitoring and analysis to uniquely help VM admins improve the operations of their virtual data-center.
Securing and Troubleshooting Applications in the Virtual Network
Consider the most frequent interruption for a systems administrator: a complaint or ticket from users claiming that an application is not responding. Since there are many potential causes for this symptom, network administrators judge their troubleshooting tools based on how well they identify possible problems and how fast explanations can be checked. Some root causes might include:
- The target application not running or not responding. Perhaps the application is truly down, or additional copies of it need to be created.
- A misconfigured DHCP, DNS or NTP service.
- Layers of multi-tier virtual applications are not communicating.
- Unusual spike in traffic or backup processes loads.
- Some users don’t have permission to use this application.
- Security breaches such as worms or viruses are affecting performance
Administrators using tools located on the external physical network cannot distinguish among these problems: radically different causes that nevertheless look the same from outside-the-box (i.e., outside the virtual server). Administrators need real-time tools with visibility into the virtual network in order to pinpoint the root cause of trouble, along with the ability to quickly remediate the issues. The Altor VF is the leading solution.
The Altor VF offers real-time graphs and historical reports of all network activity inside virtual servers, enabling administrators to always know for certain what each VM is actually doing. Additionally, the Altor VF can easily wrap firewall policies for each VM, continuously enforced through Live Migration, to uniquely lock-down each VM to its stated activity. This helps VM admins ensure and control VM activity, a common problem with the advent of VM sprawl.
To see why customer such as Hearst and Nielsen chose products from Altor Networks, please take this opportunity to contact us for a free evaluation copy of the Altor VF.