A few months ago I reported about how vendors like Cisco and Check Point have created software that essentially extends the reach of physical firewalls into a server’s hypervisor. At the time, Juniper was developing the same capability by partnering with virtualization security startup Altor Networks. Not long after I wrote that story, Juniper bought Altor. Now just a couple months after the deal Juniper has announced that it’s integrated Altor’s technology with its firewalls, the SRX Series Services Gateway products. Juniper’s new vGW Virtual Gateway is a hypervisor-level firewall based on Altor’s technology. Network engineers can deploy vGW on every virtualized server in a data center and then manage and enforce security on the VMs on those servers through the SRX hardware.

“Typically we see the data center carved up into different [security] zones,” said Peter Lunk, director of product marketing at Juniper. “We’ve done integration so that the vGW can pull down zone information from the SRX and then it can populate and place individual VMs sitting on that server into the different zones assigned by the SRX. Then it can push that information up to the SRX. Now you can see all the way down to the VM level and see which virtual machines are sitting in which zone. Now [engineers] have control over whether you can move VMs in and out of those zones. And if you’re turning up a new VM, [engineers can control] which zone it needs to be attached to. If someone is trying to change the VM we have some control over that as well.”

A product like this gives network security engineers renewed visibility and control over what’s happening within virtual infrastructure. It should also have plenty of application in cloud computing environments as well.

The vGW can also mirror traffic within hypervisors up to the SRX so that the SRX can perform deep analysis on packets and basic reporting on any anomalies. Lunk said Juniper will expand on this mirroring capability in the future. He declined to offer details, but undoubtedly Juniper will add some automated security response features to the SRX for traffic mirrored by the vGW.

Lunk said Juniper has also done some engineering work to make Altor’s syslogs compatible with its own, so that the vGW can report into Juniper’s Security Threat Response Manager (STRM).

In the video below, Xu talks about VMware’s plans to announce an “open, extensible networking virtual chassis platform so that anyone can develop the on-demand networking service on top of vSphere.”

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Hit pause at the beginning of that video and look at the white board. As Stu pointed out in his blog, you’ll see the term “vFabric” at the top, to the right. Stu thinks this could be the name of a new virtual networking OS from VMware.

VMware, Cisco and EMC formed the VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) coalition late last year, which introduced the vbBlock Infrastructure Package, a modular data center package that’s supposed to power cloud computing. It consists of fully integrated and validated bundles of software, servers, storage and network gear.  I guess Eschenbach thinks we, the media, are making too much out of the VCE coalition. But how can you avoid hyping a strategic relationship between the world’s biggest virtualization vendor, the world’s biggest storage vendor and the world’s biggest networking vendor?

And besides, VMware has more than a strategic relationship with these two companies. EMC owns 80% of VMware. In 2007, Cisco bought its own stake in the company. Yes, Cisco owns just 1.5% of VMware, but that’s probably about 100% more of an ownership stake than any VMware customer currently holds.

VMware has done a good job of staying vendor agnostic, which is important since enterprises want to be able to run a hypervisor on whatever hardware they have in their server racks. But tight relationships with partners (and part owners) will continue to be a fact of life. VMware faces some serious competition in the future from Citrix Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper V. At Interop last month, consultant Jim Metzler, of Ashton Metzler & Associates, surveyed attendees by show of hands during a panel session on virtualized application delivery appliances. First he asked attendees whether they were currently VMware shops. Nearly all of them raised their hands. Then he asked them if they expected VMware to be the only hypervisor vendor in their data center two or three years from now. No one raised a hand.

A future is coming where VMware won’t be the de facto hypervisor in data centers. How will VMware hold onto market share when Microsoft is giving away Hyper V? Advanced and innovative features and functionality is one answer. Another answer is continued strategic partnerships with key vendors, like EMC and Cisco.

Cisco (using the research firm Illuminas) surveyed 970 CCIEs internationally (as part of a 15 year celebration of the CCIE launch) to determine what the digital infrastructure landscape will look like in the next five years.

Virtualization played a large role in the survey with another 67% of respondents saying the technology would be the top networking investment over the next five years as CIOs push to reduce power consumption and spending. After years of virtualization being sold as a data center and systems technology, these results highlight the crucial role of networking in virtualization and vice versa.

Virtualization will also introduce network complexity and management challenges, according to those surveyed, so 56% of respondents said network architecting skills would be in high demand to take on these new challenges.  

The CCIEs surveyed also noted the importance of unified communications, with 77% saying IP telephony has been the single largest trend over the last five years, while another 47% said unified communications will be a leading trend in the coming five. Meanwhile, another 52% said video would be a leading enterprise green initiative.

Cisco has published full CCIE survey results, as well as a CCIE survey white paper with analysis.