Firewalls. Love them or loathe them they are a mainstay of networks. The provide protection for critical applications, offer access control services, secure vital assets, and much much more. Whether it be a hardware appliance or a virtual deployment we are putting more firewalls in places we never thought we would.
These devices litter the Internet edge, customer DMZ, and connection points from partners. In a multi-tenant environment you may have Firewalls for each customer. Each has their own set of rules, the own policies that need to be defined. The days where a single portion of the network hosts firewalls has long left us.
As hardware firewalls sound their death croak, hypervisor based virtual firewalls spring up. Guest virtual machines forwarding across intel processors can push packets at rates faster than hardware. Inflexible physical topologies collapse and give way to fast provisioned, agility driven secure segments. Virtualisation hypervisors now support software firewalls from leading vendors with products such as Juniper's Firefly, Cisco's vGW, and VMware's vShield edge. With this sudden explosion of security device deployment, the ability to put them in any conceivable point, the topic of control and management comes to the forefront.
As we transition from physical to virtual, most of us find growth (and possibly bloat) in the number of firewall devices. I am curious how others see this and how it has affect you thus far?
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