Day 2 began with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum's keynote, which Alessandro outlined here. And the security pat-down to get through the door foreshadowed the latter portion of Mendel's keynote, which focused on a new security initiative by VMware. Called VMsafe, this initiative allows security software vendors (like McAfee - maybe even Microsoft Forefront one day) to write their anti-malware and other security software to ESX Server hypervisor API.
So how is this different? Well, it's not from a functional point of view. It is different in that it's for VI3 and assumes all end users will ditch operating systems and run virtual appliances (OS with apps) on VMware's virtual infrastructure. But to be fair, Mendel spoke of this initiative within the context of the future of virtualization ... he called it virtualization 2.0.
The demo was less than futuristic, however. Alessandro described it in his post:
After another shameless plug about the availability of McAfee products as virtual appliance, a demo of VMsafe interoperability is finally shown. A Windows XP virtual machine gets attacked with a malicious code that copies away corporate documents but another virtual machine with security engine is able to transparently recognize (a virtual memory scan through VMsafe APis access) the threat and stop it before it compromises the guest OS."
To learn more and to read the entire article please refer to the rest of the article at its source: Windows Virtualization Team Blog : VMworld Europe 2008 - stay safe today
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