Virtualization is today’s Big Thing. I’ve been virtualizing my datacenters for almost eight years, so the fact that virtualization is the Big Thing today comes as a bit of a surprise. But at least someone’s been paying attention and now everyone seems to want to get on the virtualization bandwagon. One of the latest trends in the virtualization scene is the virtual appliance. A virtual appliance is a pre-built VM that you can drop onto one of your virtual servers, turn on the VM, do the basic configuration, and there you go!

Virtual appliances are a god-send to the busy network admin. Unlike physical appliances, where you have to find some rack space, and then screw the box into the rack, and then find a switch port and configure VLAN settings for the box, all you need to do with the virtual appliance is copy the file to the virtual server and turn it on. You don’t have to worry about all the hardware tasks, since you’ve already done that for the virtual server on which the virtual appliance runs on.

I noticed that we have a new advertiser over at www.isaserver.org, SpamTitan. SpamTitan is a email anti-malware, AV, anti-spam solution. What’s interesting about this offer is that they’ve made it available as a virtual appliance.You can drop it in as your inbound and outbound SMTP relay. I’ve had a chance over the last day to test it out and it’s an interesting solution. I’ll want to test it out for a few more days before giving you an opinion about the solution, but once I’m sure I understand how everything works and get a better idea of it’s performance characteristics, I’ll let you know.

HTH,

Tom

Thomas W Shinder, M.D., MCSE
Sr. Consultant / Technical Writer
Prowess Consulting www.prowessconsulting.com
PROWESS CONSULTING documentation | integration | virtualization
Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Forefront Edge Security (ISA/TMG/IAG)