I swear the entire vShield line feels like vapor ware for the SMB user. I can see the necessity of Edge or Zones if you are hosting or running in a large enterprise, but I see all of these references for "hardened third party VAs" without any mention of vendors that actually supply them. That is until I got to this discussion group and saw Trend Micro's white paper. So there is at least one.
I have a fairly simply setup. One vCenter Server 4.1, 5 ESXi 4.1 Hosts, 2 PS6000 Equallogic SAs, and approximately 35 VMs running. We currently use Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 for our desktop and laptops and I have the SEP Managment Console installed on a Server 2008 R2 x64 VM. If I understand it, I need to drop about $12,000 to get the vShield Endpoint and vShield Manager to efficiently protect my server VMs??? Can you use vShield Endpoint without Manager? That would save me ~$9,000 Then I also have to pay for a 3rd Party AV Virtual Appliance??? Can the solution be less cost effective? That is more than $240ea for 50 VMs not including the VA cost? I found this page detailing the architecture:
http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/vmware-vshield-endpoint-and-trend-micro-deep-security-7-5...
And it appears to be fairly insane indicating that the solution still requires agent installs on the VMs to provide complete protection. What is the point? All it appears to do is consolidate the definition files. Not a good value for the money. If someone has additional insite or is aware of other vendors that provide a more complete solution I'd love to hear about it.
