technical solutions and commentary

Microsoft announced the beta release of ISA Server 2006 last week and posted the standard and enterprise versions on their ISA server site for download. The downloads are available through a public beta, you need to complete a short registration form while logged into passport. The downloads are under 50MB. I’ll try an get a review posted shortly of what I find with ISA Server 2006 Beta. Go to to the ISA Server 2006 Beta download page here.
Microsoft also annouced they bought a internet filtering application that integrates with ISA server. Hopefully Microsoft releases a free “lite” version of this application to give customers free basic filtering and reporting. I think if they did this they would have a lot more people buying ISA and upgrading to a “full” version of the filtering software once the customers began seeing benefits.

This is really the ’sweet spot’ for ISA as I have experienced it. User Web Access Control , Integrated Filtering, and Reporting. Those functions are the reasons 9/10 of companies deploy ISA server in my experience. I have rarely seen a company deploy ISA to act as a primary firewall.

Releated to the Microsoft Security space, they are getting closter to releasing the Network Client Protection package.

VMWare gives away GSX Server, renamed to VMWare Server. This Vitrutalization software runs on Windows and Linux. You can download it from VMWare here.

VMWare is also giving away VMWare Player to run prebuilt virtual machines at the workstation level. You can get it from VMWare here.
You can download prebuilt Virtual machines from VMWare to use with the Player or Server here.

The idea behind giving away these products is apparently in hopes of selling the Enterprise product of ESX Server, and/or the VCenter and VMotion Management Tools which can manage VMWare Server and VMWare ESX Server environments. The free player seems to be targeted toward companies using it to distribute sofware demonstrations, etc. You still need a product such as VMWare Workstation or one of the Server products to build VMWare images to distribute with the player.

A competing OpenSorce Virtualization technology is XenSource. The current version is Xen 3.0 which is a virtualization software which runs on Linux based hosts only. The idea here is to sell Xen Management Tools to manage the free Xen 3.0 server environment. You can get Xen here.

You can also purchase Microsoft Virtual Server 2003 R2 for $99. This virtualization server runs on Windows Server, and management is performed using simple Web-based tools.

Rumor on the street is virtualization technology will be built into the next version of Windows Server known as Longhorn. The initial installation of a Longhorn server will ask you if this is a typical server or if it will be used as a virtual server host. If it is to be a virtual server, the installation routine will load a small Windows OS and the minimum required components to act as a high-performance virtualization server host. This should provide similar performance to VMWare ESX Server.

Belarc offers powerful PC audit software, Belarc Advisior, that you can download free for personal use. It runs in a few minutes and gives a detailed HTML report of the system hardware including revision levels, provides a detailed inventory of all software installed including the the minor revision updates. This is a great utility to performa a quick machine inventory/audit for documentation or troubleshooting.

They also have a commercial version that is reasonably priced for PC audits for an entire network, with better report management.

You can download Belarc Advisior Personal Edition here.