Previously an independent product VMware vShield Endpoint has now been fully integrated into VMware vSphere 5.1 and is available as part of vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. But why move away from the conventional endpoint protection model you may be asking? Well let us take a brief look at what vShield Endpoint is and some of the key benefits it could have for you as a user.
What is vShield Endpoint
VMware vShield Endpoint allows third party anti-virus providers to utilise the power of VMware vSphere to offload agent anti-virus and anti-malware workloads to a dedicated security hardened tamper proof virtual appliance.
This appliance has a scanning engine and the stored anti-virus signatures and because unlike a guest virtual machine it never goes offline, it can continually update its signatures and provide the latest security to any new or existing guest virtual machine when they come online.
Scanning is done via the hypervisors introspection capability which reduces the vulnerability of the security software itself.
A management console to configure and control the virtual appliance is provided by the third party endpoint security provider and in some cases existing management interfaces previously used to secure physical and virtual environments can be utilised for this purpose.
Key Benefits• Anti-virus software protected from attack by residing on a hardened secure virtual appliance
• Consolidation of all agents to a single virtual appliance means no more update storms
• A single virtual appliance covers all guest machines residing on its host reducing the CPU and memory footprint of the endpoint software
• Guest virtual machines deployed or moved to the host are automatically protected with the latest security definitions
• Streamlined deployment and monitoring in your vSphere environment
With the move towards virtualised desktop environments on the rise it seems inevitable that this new way of providing endpoint security will soon become the norm and with more third party providers already joining up to work with VMware we expect the product to progress and mature quickly.
Barry Knox - Technical Support - Celerity Limited
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