Earlier this year as part of our 7.6 Diablo release, we shipped Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition.
In the simplest terms, this is an exact copy of our physical appliance but instead of hulking a 2u 8380 server to your datacentre you can just flash the image up on your ESX server (or even just VMWare Server).
Not only has it been through our stringent QA and baked in our persistence and performance labs, it's also a VMWare Certified Virtual Appliance. Huzzah! :D
The really cool thing about this edition is that, because you are licensed on a per protected user basis, you can have as many virtual instances as you need.
Control centres, scanners.. Whatever you need, where ever you need it!
Want a dedicated scanner for a certain mail domain? Do it.
Want to mirror your environment in another datacentre for DR purposes? Do it.
Running Red Hat 9, it is preloaded with _exactly_ the same software 'payload' as the physical appliances (currently 7.6) so all updates we ship for the 8300 series are valid for both physical and virtual.
There are myriad reasons why virtualisation is an important research topic for companies of all sizes, everything around ROI and server consolidation is well documented already. The latest fad is around green computing too.
Anyway, i'll leave those topics for you to research yourself, besides every customer i've spoken to is already using virtualisation in some form. Whether in production or just as a test lab environment.
Which actually leads nicely to a question for you:
"How are you sanitising the updates we ship before putting them into your production environment?"
I'm sure many of you are under (or should be :P ) strict change control processes that mandate you test out updates and services releases before impacting changes on a live system.
How about this for a 5 step quick start lab environment:
1. Find a spare Windows server.
2. Install VMWare Server - it's free (
http://www.vmware.com/products/server/)
3. Download the Virtual SMS Appliance - you're already licensed for it! (
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1202?vam_featured_1&VA=1202)
4. Boot the image and go through the initial bootstrap/set-up using your existing license file (the same .slf file you uploaded to your physical ones) making sure to update the software to the same version as your production environment.
5. Restore your backed up configuration from production to the VM instance. (You
DO have a backup, right?) - See pages 375 to 378 of the Administration Guide which you can
download in PDF form here..
What's coming soon?
Right now, we are in the process of certifying both appliances in the same environment.
Currently, we don't support the use of virtual and physical appliances in the same setup.
For example, we don't support you running a virtual scanner reporting to a physical Control Centre and vice versa.
We're aiming to change that with the next release of our software, version 7.7 (codename: MacGuyver), bringing you a truly flexible approach to running your gateway security in the most effective manner possible.
Look out for further news about this upcoming release very soon!
--Ian