eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Top 5 Rated VMware Virtual Appliances

by Cameron Sturdevant

Stonesofts StoneGate Virtual IPS is a ready-to-deploy VM designed to protect internal virtual networks and servers from attacks. The product works in conjunction with the StoneGate virtual or physical firewall/VPN offerings and uses packet inspection and event correlation to stop attacks inside virtual environments. It requires other nonvirtual Stonesoft products to operate.

The CensorNet Virtual Appliance is a Web filter and content control virtual appliance that filters and monitors user Web activity. It can be used in any virtualization environment that supports OVF (Open Virtual Machine Format) appliances.

The Symantec Brightmail Gateway provides anti-spam, anti-virus, content filtering and data loss prevention for e-mail and IM. The virtual appliance enables organizations to easily add or remove anti-spam capacity.

Altor Networks’ Virtual Network Security Analyzer delivers real-time visibility and historical views into the virtual network activity. VNSA also helps data center administrators troubleshoot the virtual network, audit virtual machine usage and fulfill compliance requirements.

Certeon’s aCelera Virtual Appliance provides application acceleration over the WAN without using hardware. aCelera is optimized for applications such as content management and Web-based collaboration, and wide-area file services.