“IT today is more diverse than ever with enterprises leveraging multi-cloud strategies,” said Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of product management at Gigamon. “Because of this, traffic flowing between private and hybrid clouds can easily be unseen. Today, Gigamon solves this visibility blind spot by accessing, filtering and forwarding traffic in OpenStack/KVM-powered clouds to the security and monitoring infrastructure.” “OpenStack-powered cloud platforms continue to grow at an impressive rate,” said Christian Renaud, research director, Internet of Things at the 451 Group. “Until today, having visibility into these cloud environments has been a significant challenge, especially in multitenant situations. The Gigamon solution addresses this in a seamless manner.”
Solving the Multitenant Visibility Challenge
Several challenges exist when multiple tenants use the same set of cloud resources. Often, tenants are unaware of the physical hosts on which their virtual machines (VMs) are running, which is compounded by tenants having multiple virtual networks that may span across various hosts. Adding to this, tenants are not permitted to access hypervisor level resources, and so cannot implement any sort of virtual switch mirroring solution to see their traffic without compromising security.
With Gigamon, these problems are now solved. Gigamon now supports tenant-wide monitoring domains, while maintaining the integrity of tenant isolation boundaries. Furthermore, tenants can now monitor cloud-traffic without having “cloud admin” privileges and, best of all, one tenant’s traffic monitoring activity does not adversely impact performance of other tenants on the same host.
Tenant visibility is achieved via Gigamon vTAPs, which reside on the VMs. These filter and intelligently forward traffic to GigaVUE-VM Visibility Fabric nodes, which then optimise and deliver the modified traffic to the security and monitoring tools via the Visibility Fabric. GigaVUE-FM Fabric Manager acts as the orchestration point for user interface and APIs to integrate with OpenStack components for inventory while also configuring tenant visibility policies.
