Hi Edward,
Well, the long national nightmare is over. Last week Catbird announced the industry's first ever virtual security assessment. You give us 30 days (or even 1!) and we'll give you a comprehensive report assessing the state of your virtual infrastructure chock full of actionable intelligence. No obligation to purchase and deploy Catbird afterwards (although we think people will be happy to have NAC, IPS/IDS, Policy Enforcement, Vulnerability Monitoring and Sprawl Control, among other services, watching their virtual deployment). No ginsu knives. Just a non-invasive, hard-hitting way to kick-off what has to be one of the most important IT Security decisions people are going to make this year. Catbird is one of the pioneers in virtsec and we have seen a lot of data center chiefs struggle to get up to speed on what questions to even ask their security people. This is the tool they need.
Here's the shameless plug: Visit www.catbird.com/vsa for more info.
Thanks for covering this important issue.
Tamar Newberger (in charge of marketing here at Catbird)

Hello,

After this blog post was written Tripwire announced their Tripwire ConfigCheck which compares your environment to the VMware VI3 Hardening Guidelines. This is a very good start for security analysis.

Catbird has a great tool as well but it also has its weaknesses, specifically it requires an agent on the VMs for full implementation. Which is a little invasive to me.

Addressing the hardening of VI3, or the network security aspects, has its own concerns. There is still quite a bit more to virtualization security than the host(s), or network involved. Granted they are by far the easiest to understand.

Best regards,
Edward Haletky

Hi,
Just for clarification, Catbird does NOT require an agent on the VMs. All we require is a single (no cost) stateless agent on the virtual subnet, which is freely downloadable from our website. The agent is just another VM. Catbird does security as a service - all of the intelligence is in a web-based portal. The agent is just a network sensor - completely non-invasive.
Thanks!
Tamar