Not On My VM. Step One In Secure Cloud Usage.

A few years ago, a gentleman created a video showing how quickly an unpatched, unprotected Windows XP machine was infected once connected to the public Internet (the linked video is worth a watch, and is short). That video took the business community pretty much by storm, but was old news to security administrators and most systems administrators. Things have improved on the operating systems side of the house, but so have the systems, attackers, and environment for hackers, meaning things aren’t much better today. In the confines of your enterprise, that’s all cool. Whether you are deploying a...

Extreme Automation. Dynamic Control with or without the Cloud.

In the data center of the future, you are going to need to be able to bring up new instances of an application, have them fully functional without any user intervention, and when they’re no longer needed they  should clean up after themselves and quietly go away. Five years ago this was fantasy talk, two years ago it was coming to the fore, and today we can see clearly that such adaptable infrastructure is going to be mandatory for any installation/application that has a highly variable rate of throughput. The drivers for this need for adaptability are varied, but...

v.10 - iSessions in the Cloud (or a remote data center, you choose)

Well, I’ve covered the basics of iSessions – a secure, optimized tunnel between two BIG-IPs – so now it’s time to talk about usefulness, both today and going forward. Since iSessions are an infrastructure issue, the following works for redundant data centers also, assuming they have BIG-IPs in them, it’s just that cloud is the buzzword du-jour, and there’s actually a teentsy bit more benefit to using them for the cloud. First off, I assume that your cloud vendor has BIG-IPs (that is a safe assumption as of today), but you’re living in the real world, check with them...

v.10 - Introduction to iSessions

Amongst the wave of new features that came out in Version 10 of TMOS is a nifty little feature called iSessions. This being the first release of iSessions, there is a lot of curiosity and not as much documentation as we’d like yet. So I’ll walk you through what is available, why you’d want to use it, and what benefits it offers in this blog post. As time goes on we will expand our coverage of iSessions to more fully discuss all of the options and challenges they present. The concept of iSessions in v.10 is pretty straight-forward…...