According to a recent report put out by the Reuters news agency, VMware has formed partnerships with some of the world's biggest security software makers, namely Symantec Corp, McAfee Inc, the Internet Security Systems division of International Business Machines Corp, EMC Corp's RSA security unit and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Why? VMware wants to better protect the hypervisor and its virtual machines.

The project is being called VMsafe and the official announcement is expected in a matter of days at the VMworld Europe conference taking place in Cannes, France.

Security complexities and unknown security factors probably have kept any number of organizations from adding the server virtualization technology into their production environments. And I'm sure VMware is quite aware of that problem, and they know that they need to have a clear answer for these security concerns in order to further penetrate the market.

Third-party companies such as Blue Lane Technologies and Catbird showed up at VMworld 2007 to showcase their VMware security solutions, and it looks like both companies will be exhibiting at VMworld Europe 2008. It will certainly be interesting to see how this new VMsafe solution compares with the offerings from these companies and ultimately how it will affect them.

Posted by David Marshall on February 24, 2008 05:04 AM