It’s already written in the stars that VMware’s in the driver’s seat of the virtualization wagon.  The success of the recently concluded VMworld Conference proved that numerous other enterprises look to them as an industry leader.  And being on the frontier, VMware will need to make its products robust, and build up on its security offerings.  Hackers love catching the biggest fish, after all.  They feed into the fear and worry of individuals and businesses, and the larger the scope, the happier they are.  Although vSphere becomes an enforcement juncture for firewall applications, this is just a classic example of being compliant as much as they could, but not as they should.

Together with John Furrier in The Cube during VMworld 2011, Wikibon.org founder Dave Vellante noted a big area that VMware still needs to develop—security.

“What a difference between last year and this year with VDI do-over.  Security is the big area for me.  The ecosystem is over-stating capabilities and VMware has a lot more work to do.  This is VMware’s problem and they need to solve this.  Yes, they need help from the ecosystem, but they need to build it into their architecture.”

Being a customer-driven organization, VMware tries to hear out the public plea and released a compliance checker tool via their Center for Policy and Compliance (CP&C) arm.  This free downloadable tool, vSphere 4.1 Compliance Checker will help users get started on a safer ride in the cloud, running tests on vCenter-managed ESX/ESXi hosts. You may use the tool over and over again to ensure that firewall configurations will not open up to hackers, and to verify whether you are using a particular VMware tool properly. Last August, Flashsoft also introduced a tool crafted to leverage cache as SSD level and identify the best way to utilize their product.

Cloud security is a widespread mission that is deemed to be one of the hardest to accomplish at the enterprise level.  And its security is also one of VMware’s quests, as threats get more and more serious, hindering enterprise adoption of virtualization and cloud services.  Security is something that they owe to their customers, especially now that their products’ prices have already hit the ceiling.