Category: Ravello Systems

Ravello Systems today announced that its nested virtualization technology will render the Nutanix Community Edition available on Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud. The partnership between Ravello Systems and Nutanix marks the first time hyperconverged infrastructure technology such as the Nutanix Community Edition is available on the public cloud and powerfully illustrates the efficacy of one of Ravello’s three use cases, namely the facilitation of the deployment of cloud environments by rendering an expanded roster of hypervisors compatible with a cloud environment and infrastructure. By partnering with Ravello Systems, Nutanix customers can take advantage of the community edition of its converged infrastructure platform without the operational challenge of purchasing, deploying and managing hardware. Instead, customers of Nutanix on AWS or the Google Cloud can select the Nutanix Community Edition blueprint from within the Ravello Systems platform and launch Nutanix infrastructures on the selected public cloud within minutes. The enhanced and streamlined operational agility with respect to both deployment and ongoing management means that Nutanix customers can focus on optimizing their converged infrastructure deployments by means of attention to analytics and KPIs that enable the optimization of infrastructure performance. More importantly, by making Nutanix Community Edition available on AWS and Google Cloud via Ravello, Nutanix stands to benefit from increased exposure to a wider range of customers that may be in the market for a converged infrastructure solution for their data center. As told to Cloud Computing Today in an interview with Shruti Bhat, Director of Marketing at Ravello Systems and Nikita Maheswari from Nutanix’s Product Marketing Team, the partnership between Ravello and Nutanix rests on a product integration marked by a rewriting of the Acropolis hypervisor used by Nutanix to render it compatible with Ravello’s nested hypervisor technology. As such, the announcement continues to underscore the ability of Ravello Systems to engineer its platform to accommodate a multitude of hypervisor technology toward the end of facilitating migrations from on premise environments to the cloud, or for other use cases such as dev and test or even security testing.

Ravello Systems today announced details of a new and powerful use case for its nested virtualization technology in the form of the ability to allow customers to perform security sandbox penetration testing and malware testing on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Given that public clouds such as AWS typically impose limits on the frequency and scheduling of penetration testing because they find it difficult to differentiate between orchestrated penetration testing and legitimate security threats to their infrastructures, Ravello’s nested virtualization technology provides customers with the ability to conduct penetration and malware testing at will. On the AWS platform, for example, Ravello’s nested virtualization platform empowers customers to perform penetration testing by isolating the test from Amazon’s infrastructure as enabled by the conjunction of Ravello’s HVX hypervisor technology and its software defined L2 networking platform. The encapsulation and isolation specific to Ravello’s L2 networking technology means that customers can analyze the results of penetration or malware testing using data from Ravello’s instance, without reference to the underlying AWS or Google Cloud infrastructure. More importantly, customers now have the ability to expeditiously create copies of their on premise infrastructures on AWS and Google Cloud and thereby run security tests at will without compromising the integrity of their deployments. Moreover, Ravello’s nested hypervisor technology allows customers to store blueprints of their security sandbox testing in the cloud for future tests in ways that optimize the operational efficiencies associated with security testing. All in all, the ability to run sandbox security testing in the cloud using Ravello marks a breakthrough use case for Ravello’s innovative technology that stands to disrupt the cybersecurity landscape by rendering it increasingly convenient, affordable, secure and operationally efficient to conduct penetration and malware testing using the public cloud.

The following video, courtesy of Ravello Systems, elaborates on the concept of nested virtualization whereby the Ravello Systems hypervisor, HVX, enables a multi-VM-based application to run on AWS or the Google Cloud. Navin Thadani, Ravello’s SVP of Products, elaborates on two modalities of nested virtualization that include running the ESXi hypervisor atop Ravello’s high performance HVX hypervisor to run ESXi labs on Google or Amazon AWS.