VMware Distributed Switching; a better dashboard
VMware Distributed Switches (vDS), which was enhanced in VMware vSphere 5.1 and has become an important part of the management of our virtual infrastructure.
After implementing the newer version of this great feature and looking at the dashboard, one of the senior engineers on the projects and solutions team was running Netflow statistics- something that was useful and relevant only with all traffic on our virtual infrastructure being captured.
The picture above shows that there was something of an anomaly; China has suddenly become a top destination for traffic, with 3 IP addresses trying to connect on port 3389, RDP. Of course the logs had 1000’s of failed log on attempts as some script ran through a brute force attack on this demo server.
Netflow statistics make it very easy to see what is happening with network traffic, especially with the dashboard view – part of the single pane of glass management that we aspire to in design. This includes traffic that only stays within your virtual infrastructure, something that is very difficult to achieve otherwise.
Call us to find out how easy it is for us to install vDS and correctly reconfigure your VMware network traffic, a free component of VMware vSphere 5 (with Enterprise + editions), so you too can have an eagle eye view of where the network traffic is going.
(NB – no Spam or bot-nets were created in this example. Naughty traffic only gets in when we let it (in seconds usually!). Stay tuned for more on edge security when we type about the new Palo Alto firewalls we are firing up).
