VMware vShield is a product developed through the Blue Lane acquisition last year by VMware. This security product sits between the hypervisor and the guest VM and is installed as a virtual appliance which integrates with vCenter. To install vShield with in the virtual environment a user will need to upgrade the virtual environment to vSphere to support the implementation.
Configure vShield zones to protect and monitor your virtual environment in a multitude of ways.
Depending on your view in vCenter will determine how you secure your environment:
Server View: Allows you to set a security zone at the Data Centre, cluster, resource pool, etc
Network and Flow: Allows for securing at the vSwitch, VLAN or protocol level TCP, UDP, port number, etc
In addition vShield also gives you stateful packet protection across vMotion VM’s.

Sooner or later even the graphic cards had to be virtualised.

To achieve this task three components are needed: a chipset providing some sort of I/O virtualisation technologies, a virtualisation platform that can support it, and a display card that can handle the requests to access its GPU coming from different virtual machines at the same time.
The first three companies that made this possible are Intel, which provides the I/O virtualisation technology (VT-d), Parallels, which provides the platform (Workstation) and NVIDIA which provides the GPU (Quadro with SLI Multi-OS).
Looking at this from a virtual desktop perspective the day is fast approaching where the percived limitations of using highly demanding applications will soon be over. There are many vendors now that are reducing the gap, and the benefits to businesses once this occurs will be massive. It is possible today to run many 2D and 3D applications with in a virtual environment on specific hardware, but once virtualisation companies such as VMware can achieve this through software then we will truely be there.
With VMware’s next release of its View product many 2D applications will be supported to run in a virtual environment either using TCX from Wyse a software verison of Teradici PC-over-IP or the RGS protocol from HP.
As you can see things are really starting to change for the virtual desktop and with the economy as it is, VDI could now start to offer the savings it always promised.

VMware vSphere is the latest release of its popular virtualisation software.
vSphere will only be able to run on 64bit hardware and some of its additional enhancements will only work with a small number of processors like the Nahalem 5500 series. With these considerations in mind upgrading from your existing virtual infrastructure will require some detailed planning to ensure a successful migration to vSphere.
Some of the enhancements that come with the latest version are:
Host Scalability:
64-bit VMkernel
512GB
64 logical CPUs
256 virtual machines per host

Virtual Machine Scalability:
8-way Virtual SMP
256GB RAM
Hardware Version 7
• New virtual devices
• VMDirectPath I/O
• Hot plug support

In addition to the above vSphere will also include:
• SCSI-3 compliant meaning you can install Windows Server 2008 MSCS
• IPv6 is supported
• vNetwork Distributed Switches

VMinformer has been officially launched at VMworld Europe in Cannes, click to view the press release at  vmworld.com