Guardium V10 - Micro Tips #1 - RHEL 6

by John Haldeman, Practice Lead

Everyone by now knows that Guardium V10 has been released. It's an exciting release with a lot of features. I expect to see a lot presented and written on the big features like the new UI, file activity monitoring, query rewrite, and new vulnerability assessment data sources, etc. in the next few months. What I want to take some time to do on this blog is talk about the little features that might not get a lot of attention but can make a difference in the everyday lives of Guardium administrators and practitioners like me. I'll be calling those Micro Tips, and this is the first one.

Since I have just finished deploying a virtual machine in my lab environment for V10, let's talk about the operating system and virtualization (btw, if you want a step by step guide for the installation of Guardium V10 and some things that have changed since V9, this blog post is a great resource. One particularly nice thing is that the imaging process is now completely unattended - no waiting to enter passwords half way through the install process. That is a great decision.)

Guardium V10 got an upgrade in it's OS from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6 (RHEL 6.5 to be exact). Since you never really get to touch the underlying operating system, this might be transparent and not matter to you. That being said, it does actually make a difference for some using VMWare deployments using newer types of virtual adapters. If you want to use paravirtual SCSI adapaters (as described here) and VMXNET3 type virtual network adapters (as described here), you should now be able to do that a lot more easily. Those drivers were included in RHEL6, but not RHEL5 by default.

Note, in the case of VMXNET3 adapters, you could enable them in the past with some awkward additional steps, but now since it is running on RHEL6, it *should* come packaged with a VMXNET3 driver and work out the gate.

Note that I have not confirmed this - my current lab environment doesn't have those options. Theoretically the Guradium organization could have taken the drivers out, but I don't see why they would. I will try and confirm they are in there and update this post.