It's perhaps worth noting that any example of IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) deals with the same issues that Kelly will be dealing with. This is typical of "cloud" computing; in fact, Amazon EC2 is perhaps the largest public cloud provider, and any firewalls, A-V scanners, IDS engines and other security-related pieces of infrastructure are running in VMs, whether that's immediately evident to the end user or not. (Linux-based EC2 instances are all, AFAIK, Xen DomU instances. I suspect Windows EC2 instances also run under Xen, but I've never researched that.)
So, at the very least, a whole bunch of quite large companies have decided that yes, it *is* OK to host security services on virtualized hardware.
By the same token, I'm quite certain that Citrix provides a *very* different level of support to Amazon than they'll provide to you or me!
-Adam
I meant to make reference in my last e-mail to the current issue of the Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ) from Cisco, particularly the article "Cloud Computing: A Primer" at http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_12-4/124_clou... .
(For those who aren't network specialists, yes, Cisco publishes the IPJ, but it maintains a very good record of being vendor- and product-agnostic. It is not, to be clear, a peer-reviewed academic journal, although all articles are reviewed by its editorial board before publication.)
-Adam
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Adam Thompson -
Adam Thompson