Altor Networks, a 14-month-old start-up backed by $6 million in funding from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, says the kind of security used on physical machines flat-out doesn’t work in the virtual world and that you’ve got to think of virtualized machines as a network unto itself. Altor’s thinking that way and claims to be able to make a virtual environment more secure than a physical one by putting the security at the network level, specifically on the virtual (software) switch.

Virtual servers may make the utilization of physical servers more efficient, but that efficiency comes with a price. The physical servers that support virtual machines (VMs) have to be more powerful. Less obviously, they also need better input/output (I/O) capability than standalone machines, which means more cabling to connect the virtual machines to the network switch and more switch ports to accommodate the increased number of virtual machines contending for the network's resources.

There is an important distinction between virtual networks and networks inside of a hypervisor. If you hook up a bunch of VMs to a vswitch inside of an ESX server, you might call that a virtual network, and that would be reasonable because its a network inside of a vmware server, right? But if you hook up a bunch of things using a VLAN, you might call that a virtual network too. After all, a VLAN is a Virtual Local Area Network. So which of these views is correct?

The Virtualization Forum really had three highlights for me. Number one was John Humphreys Introduction, He is IDC’s primary Virtualization analyst and gave a summary of the state-of-the-art.

ESX servers have a whole virtual network within them: guest machines connect to virtual switches and uplinks from these switches to the outside. Although, one term that is not used outside of ESX are "port groups." After reading a bit about them and looking at the various tools the the ESX console provides, I think the best way for a network engineer to understand port groups is to see them as network hubs connected to a single vswitch port. This actually makes sense for multiple reasons:

Enterprises' ability to realize every last dollar from their network investments by adding new services the moment they are needed is now a reality with a new network virtualization solution from Nortel. Nortel's virtualization solution makes it possible for the many previously separated elements within enterprise networks to be linked together, harnessing the power of each to work together as one, eliminating the need for costly re-engineering when new services are needed.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

The world's largest temporary network, which powers Interop, sheds physical servers by going virtual. The monster network that powers the Interop Las Vegas show has joined the virtual age. For the first time, network engineers who build the world's largest temporary network and dismantle it a week later are going with an almost totally virtualized server environment, according to network architect Geoff Horne.

Evan Jafa, CIO of First American, says getting your virtualized servers set up and running right really is just the start of any IT leader's virtualization work. And that if you don't think holistically about virtualization, you're in for a rude surprise. "I think lots of folks are going to find out that virtualization poses a whole new set of concerns for security, networks and applications," says Jafa.

BLADE Network Technologies announced the availability of its new RackSwitch network virtualization switches - switches designed for IBM's iDataPlex, an inexpensive, custom-configured rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency to address Web 2.0-style computing.