Enhancing virtual visibility

"Virtualisation is creating blind spots, or invisible networks, within server infrastructures making it difficult to secure the network traffic, diagnose problems, and analyse performance,” said Christian Renaud, Senior Analyst with 451 Research. “There are a number of end users who have deployed the Cisco Nexus 1000V within their VMware virtual infrastructures to help ensure that consistent network policy is enforced throughout the data centre. It makes sense for Gigamon to add support for these customers with their latest release. Their support for vMotion is exciting as well because without the ability to automatically migrate the monitoring policies with vMotion, visibility would be lost once the vMotion occurs and would require manual reconciliation and that would be a nightmare to manage in agile virtual infrastructures."

The goal of the Gigamon Unified Visibility Fabric architecture is to deliver pervasive visibility and simplified management and provisioning of monitoring policies across all network topologies including physical, virtual and software-defined networks (SDN). The GigaVUE-VM exposes inter-VM traffic flowing in a physical host and across physical hosts with intelligent filtering and forwarding capabilities for monitoring and troubleshooting virtual environments. The addition of GigaVUE-VM 2.0 expands Gigamon’s pervasive visibility into VMware virtual infrastructures that utilise the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch. The 2.0 update also provides automatic re-configuration of the Visibility Fabric architecture by migrating monitoring policies to maintain continuous visibility when a vMotion event occurs.

“GigaVUE-VM 2.0 automates the ‘tuning’ of monitoring policies in response to real-time network events such as the migration of a virtual machine from one host to another,” said Huy Nguyen, Sr. Director of Product Management at Gigamon. “In addition, traffic between virtual machines on the same host is switched locally without ever hitting the physical network, thus rendering the existing analysis tools blind to that virtual traffic. Now, GigaVUE-VM bridges the gap between the physical and virtual worlds and allows complete visibility to monitoring and management tools.”
The GigaVUE-VM 2.0 upgrade is available immediately and pricing starts at $14,995 for 10 GigaVUE-VM Visibility Fabric nodes.

About the Unified Visibility Fabric architecture
At Gigamon we realised that delivering the visibility essential to manage, analyse and secure the complex system that is the IT infrastructure requires a new approach. With millions of traffic flows across thousands of endpoints, visibility needs to be pervasive, intelligent and dynamic. Using our patented, unique technology, we created an innovative new approach for delivering this visibility called the Visibility Fabric architecture. This new approach is intelligent and versatile in its ability to enable visibility into the network.