Likewise Blog

In 1995 we worried about users bringing in their own software. In 2010, we’ve got users downloading their own virtual machines. This week at VMworld, Gartner’s Chris Wolf conducted a session on private cloud security that raised a few eyebrows and called into question the security of virtualized environments.

The entire VMworld show has been enlightening, but Wolf’s session was particularly interesting given Likewise’s role in the data center. While he was talking, I couldn’t help but realize I’ve seen this cycle before — like when networking started taking off inside most companies in the mid-90s and the security controls weren’t quite ready for the combination of computers that were suddenly chatty with each other and users bringing in software from home.

Companies have learned their lesson about user-installable software, and you’ll find very few companies that haven’t locked down their desktops and servers to prevent unauthorized software. Instead, companies — according to Wolf — are starting to see a rash of unauthorized virtual machines that pose real threats to internal security.

The obvious gap here is adequate privileged user management. Users are prevented from installing software through company policy, usually enforced by Microsoft Active Directory, on their Windows machines. But admin privileges at the hypervisor level mean that people are downloading and running unverified, unauthorized, and occasionally malicious virtual machines. Wolf described one scenario where a company suffered an internal Denial of Service (DoS) attack by a malicious virtual machine.

In the rush to embrace virtualization, companies haven’t always treated virtual machines as carefully as they have other forms of software. That’s changing now, and policies are reflecting that. The next step, of course, is to enforce that policy at the authentication layer and audit what the users are doing to ensure that the virtual machines that are running in your environment are acquired and deployed properly.

VMware has shown that it’s well aware of the needs that enterprises have to keep control of their network and the machines — both physical and virtual — running within. This is why we’ve worked closely with the company to integrate Likewise identity service into ESXi, to provide organizations with the ability to set policy and enforce it using Microsoft Active Directory and across Windows systems, Linux systems, Unix systems, Mac OS, and ESXi hosts. Technology keeps leaping ahead, but the basic problems always remain — companies need to keep a tight control over the services, software, and even virtual machines running on their network.

If you’re not on the floor at Moscone Center this week, you’re missing out on one of the best virtualization conferences of the year. VMworld 2010 is one of the best attended industry events I have seen in at least three years. Virtualization, and VMware, are still at the top of mind today if the turnout at VMworld 2010 is any indication. Attendees are very engaged, and actively looking for solutions to support their virtualization initiatives.

Likewise has a great booth location (#1606) this year, near the show floor entrance.  We have a steady stream of people visiting our booth showing strong interest in Likewise Open, Likewise Enterprise, and the tech preview for the Likewise Virtual Storage Appliance. Interest at the booth ranged from enterprises looking to better integrate Unix and Macs with their existing AD infrastructure, to storage vendors asking how they could leverage Likewise to enhance their product offerings.

Likewise support for VMware environments is highlighted on several fronts at the show.  The Active Directory support now shipping as part of the ESXi 4.1 release which Likewise provides was highlighted as a main feature of the release.  In a track session on ESXi 4.1, our support was covered in a detailed demonstration and the presenter directed attendees to the Likewise booth to find out more about what Likewise can do to better integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac OS environments with Windows Active Directory. As a result, we saw a steady stream of attendees at the Likewise booth to learn more.

We also had a chance to talk to attendees and hear the reaction to our directory integration in ESXi 4.1. Reactions ranged from moderate enthusiasm to “this is amazing!” when we confirmed that upgrading their environment from vSphere 3.x to 4.1 would provide directory integration automatically. We’ve been really excited about our announcement since March, but having an opportunity to hear what it means to users has us even more stoked.

Perhaps the best story yet is a Likewise user that stopped by the booth on Tuesday and talked virtualization security with us for a while, and learned what more we can do for them.  We gave him a t-shirt, and he went on his way.  This morning, he walked by the booth wearing his t-shirt.  He came and told us, “I received a bunch of t-shirts from vendors yesterday.  But I decided to wear the one from the company that does the most for me.” And that’s us!

If you’re at VMworld this week, stop by the booth and say hi. We’ve got plenty of t-shirts to hand out and are looking to talk to as many VMware and virtualization users as possible, live and in person. We’d like to hear about how you’re using virtualization, cloud technologies, and the challenges people are seeing integrating integrating all these technologies in a rapidly changing data center.

The show is half over, but this promises to be a great week!

In 2009, the Linux Foundation started its own Linux conference, dubbed LinuxCon. The event brought together a mix of industry experts and Linux developers to meet and talk about the state of the Linux ecosystem. Last year the foundation hosted the event in Portland, and moved it to Boston for 2010. The move didn’t do anything to diminish the event, though.

One of the highlights of LinuxCon 2010 was the keynote by Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research. Hammond looked at open source adoption in the enterprise, a topic near and dear to Likewise. The bad news? Hammond said that the “urgency to adopt” open source has diminished. The good news? That’s because it’s already so pervasive that it’s hard to find an enterprise without significant investment in open source.

Hammond’s overall message was that open source has largely “won” in terms of enterprise mindshare. Few enterprises are without open source deployments, and they’re choosing Linux and open source not just because it’s cheaper – but also because it’s more flexible and the developers working with open source find it easier to deploy and work with once it’s deployed. Hammond also noted the rapid uptake in Linux among developers and, Ubuntu is leading the pack there with more than 17% of developers working with Eclipse choosing Ubuntu.

Judging by the presentations at LinuxCon the overall health of Linux is excellent, with a lot of interesting work going on in areas of interest to the enterprise. Chris Mason’s presentation on the state of Btrfs was standing room only, as were many talks at the event.

Linux is also getting smaller. That is to say, while about half of the talks at LinuxCon were focused on enterprise issues like scaling or server adoption, databases for cloud services, and so on – a pretty hefty swath of talks focused on Linux on mobile devices. The MeeGo keynote co-presented by Intel and Nokia was very well attended, and Dawn Foster’s “where are we now” community talk was also standing room only.

Linux on the desktop received less attention this year, compared to 2009. The year of the Linux desktop may be a few years away, but Linux in the enterprise and on mobile devices seems extremely healthy.

Next year, LinuxCon will be packing its bags and heading West once again, this time to Vancouver, BC. Since that’s just a car trip away from the Likewise headquarters, we’re already looking forward to attending next year’s LinuxCon and seeing how the industry is faring in 2011.

So I am out at Red Hat Summit for the fourth year in a row, and it’s great to see some old friends  — not to mention new ones (the crowds grow every year).

Speaking of old friends, one of our favorite integrators, Shadow-Soft, just won the Partner Catalyst award out here at Red Hat Summit. This kind of goes to show what I was talking about in my previous post: Likewise gives Systems Integrators so much flexibility — allowing flexibility of operating platform choice when trying to best figure out a client’s overall solution requirements. Not being tied down to Windows is rapidly making more and more sense for companies, and showing how Likewise can make Linux, Unix or Mac first-class citizens in a Windows environment turns many of our Systems Integrators into trusted solution providers. So congrats to the folks over at Shadow-Soft, you guys deserve it!

Next week is Red Hat Summit and we’ll be flying our colors in booth 7.   In fact, this is our fourth year attending the event, and every year we’ve seen an increase in activity not just at the event but in the amount of Red Hat customers we are working with for Active Directory integration.  Yep, we’re big fans of Red Hat — especially considering  just how many of our customers use Red Hat as their primary server or desktop platform. And, we’re a previous winner of the Red Hat Innovation Award in the category of Enhanced Security.

As Barry Crist has noted, Red Hat is doing some exciting work in the Cloud, and we see them being successful there.  Our developers work hard to make sure our software, both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise, works well with Red Hat’s.

These are some exciting times for both Red Hat and Likewise, as both companies redefine the future of interoperability in the datacenter.  We’re doing this with commitment to community and open source,  focused and driven engineering and development teams, and creative thinking by our executives and project managers that dares to push the envelope.

Here’s what Tracy Lothringer, Director of Strategic Alliances has to say about Red Hat:

“More than half of Likewise customer server licenses are on Red Hat — so our relationship with them is a critical one. Red Hat is moving well beyond data center oriented Unix migration and is reaching into the broader market. We’re seeing RHEL adoption in market segments that hadn’t been using Unix previously — representing new growth for Linux.  These customers require solutions to unify their increasingly mixed environments.”

We’re really looking forward to this show.  If you’re going, please let us know in the comments, email us at info@likewise.com, or come see us in booth number 7!  We’re a ‘Silver Sponsor’ at this years’ show with a pretty good-sized booth, so we should be easy to find!  Stop on by and say hello, see a demo of Likewise in action, and enter to win an iPad.

Event Details:
Red Hat Summit – Likewise in Booth 7
June 22-25th, 2010
Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center
One Seaport Lane
Boston, MA 02210
www.redhat.com/summit

One more thing to mention–on June 29th (Tuesday of the week after next) we’re hosting a joint webinar with Red Hat titled  “Securing RHEL Servers with Likewise and Active Directory.”  The webinar is free and we’re encouraging show attendees to invite others in their organization to the webinar as well as anyone else who would like to join.  Register here

See you in Boston!

iPhones, iPads, apps and more…Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is quite the spectacle these days in consumer markets.  However, one thing that isn’t talked about much in the Apple-flavored gadget and rumor blogs is the enterprise presence at WWDC.

Likewise has always placed value in WWDC, and this year we’ve sent down members of our development team to San Francisco to participate again.  They’ll be engaging with Apple developers and other vendor developers to exchange ideas and contribute toward furthering interoperability of Macs in Active Directory environments.

Likewise is the clear leader in our category in Mac support–and much of this is due to our relationship with the Apple development team.  Likewise worked with Apple and is the only vendor that can offer native integration with Apple’s Workgroup Manager application, making it easy to manage Mac system settings remotely through Active Directory.  We seamlessly integrate Macs with AD, allowing administrators to assign server access privileges based on AD accounts to Mac users.  We also fully support Snow Leopard.

We’re excited for our team to get back from WWDC and use ideas exchanged at the show to further our technology leadership on the Mac.  Stay tuned–we’re working hard on our technology for the Mac and we’ll be announcing new product features sometime later this year!

Join Likewise at FOSE March 23 – 25 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. Stop by Likewise booth 2932 and learn how to securely connect Linux, Unix and Mac to Active Directory.

Event Details
FOSE – Likewise Booth 2932
March 23 – 25, 2010
Walter E. Washington Convention Center
Washington D.C.
www.fose.com

Learn how to achieve the following benefits with Likewise Enterprise during a live product demo at FOSE:

• Help demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards with detailed auditing and reporting
• Increase operational efficiency by minimizing manual processes of user account management
• Streamline user management with a single user-single ID policy
• Simplify user access to corporate resources with single sign-on
• Apply uniform group policies to all users and computers
• Improve network security with effective access control
• Reduce complexity by managing virtual environments and physical infrastructure in the same way

If you’re in DC for FOSE — Please drop by the Likewise booth and say hello!

Likewise is heading down to Salt Lake City from March 21-25 for Novell BrainShare 2010. We’ll have a booth in the exhibition hall, and our CTO Manny Vellon will be presenting at two sessions. We will be showcasing Likewise Enterprise, which is a key component of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11.

Here’s a little paragraph on BrainShare from their website:

One of the chief reasons to attend BrainShare 2010 is the learning. It’s an environment where in one session, you can find answers to questions that may have been plaguing you for weeks or months. It’s like having the complete reference library on technology at your disposal.

Want to know what Manny’s sessions are about? Here is the scoop from the session catalog:

Title: Using Likewise Enterprise to integrate SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop with Active Directory

Technical Level: Intermediate

Abstract: The session will provide participants with a detailed look at the features and functions available to the systems administrator charged with deploying SLED in a Windows environment. Using real-world examples, participants will see how Likewise Enterprise can help integrate SLED with Active Directory to gain access to network shares and Group Policy Objects.

Headed down? Come say hello! We’ll be in the exhibition hall at booth 1025. Please come by and learn more about Likewise, how to make use of Likewise Enterprise in SLED, and how you can also use Likewise Enterprise on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Likewise’s roots with the Linux community go deep — back to the very beginning of the company. If you’re partial to penguins and working in a Windows world, there’s a pretty solid chance that you have heard of Likewise before. You may have even downloaded and tried out our Likewise Open. (If you haven’t—check it out—it’s free!)

Some of our key developers at Likewise and Krishna Ganugapati, our VP of Engineering, will be headed down to LinuxCon next week in Portland. Along with participating in the conference, Likewise will also have a table where you can meet some of the engineers and talk about interoperability between Linux and Windows.

If you’re headed to Portland, stop by the table and say hi!

When it comes to virtualization and Active Directory, nobody does more and has more experience than Likewise.  So, no surprise, we’ll be at next week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco at booth #2507.

It’s critical to protect information and data from unauthorized access to ensure that virtual servers have the same levels of security as physical servers. Likewise software is built into Citrix XenServer 5.5 to provide integration with networks using Microsoft Active Directory for authentication and identity management. That announcement is here.

We’re doing work, too, with the biggest virtualization company of all but we can’t say too much about that yet.  At any rate, c’mon by and say hello.  Our CEO, Barry Crist, and others will be around.