VM

Setting up Websense on a Virtual machine

Ok so I was setting up a Websense VM in standalone mode and there are a few things that you need to do to make this work.

So, part of a Websense implementation includes setting up port spanning/mirroring on a port that connects to you monitor NIC so that it recieves all the traffic from your firewall. In ESX you will need to create a vSwitch for the Websense monitor network and allocate one of your physical NIC’s to to it which will plug into your mirror port on the switch.

The important step in creating this vSwitch is to go into the properties and enable it to act in promiscous mode, if you do not do this then your monitor vNic will not see any traffic.

After that just configure the second virtual NIC on your Websense VM to be a part of your Websense monitor network and Bob’s your uncle.

Shutdown a frozen VM

I was assisting a peer of mine with this issue. He had a VM where the guest OS froze. He attempted to shut off the VM but that also froze at 95%. He was then unable to do anything with the VM. We did some searching and found a way to force the VM offline from the command line which allowed us to then power the VM back on and everythign was fine.

Here is the link:

 http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/…

File level restore from a VM: Veeam vs vRanger

So you want to do a file level restore from a VM? Well great, its a nice feature and I think you should. Now what software are you going to use to do it with?

Both vRanger and Veeam have the ability, here is the difference. with vRanger it has to completely uncompress the entire VM before it can do this, depending on the size of your VM you can guess that this isn’t a quick process. Veeam doesn’t require you to do this and its pretty instantaneous.

So here is your choice for your restore: a few minutes with Veeam or a few hours with vRanger. Not a hard choice for me.