Last updated at Tue, 25 Apr 2023 23:22:38 GMT

We're very excited that VMware is showcasing Rapid7 as an official VMware NSX Partner at VMworld 2013 this week, demonstrating how we provide best-in-class vulnerability management for virtual networks.


Rapid7 has been a longtime partner with VMware.  In 2011, we introduced our vAsset discovery method that allows Nexpose to have real-time visibility into changes to your virtual environment.  This helped solve the gap security administrators commonly had with knowing how their virtual environment is changing.  Fast forward to 2013, now we are revolutionizing how core vulnerability assessment is done in a virtual infrastructure.

We've listened to challenges our customers have with vulnerability scanning in virtual environments and worked closely together with VMware to develop a joint solution. Customers frequently told us that traditional vulnerability scans run over the network against virtual machines to identify vulnerabilities.  As a result, this takes up network bandwidth, only identifies devices connected to the network, and is limited to the speed of the connection.  And deep scanning requires authentication scan credentials to be supplied, which can be a time consuming process with additional management overhead.  This prevented them from having the real-time visibility into the vulnerabilities in their virtual environment.

To address these challenges, Nexpose integrates fully with the NSX platform to perform vulnerability scans through the hypervisor without requiring a network connection between scan engine and virtual machines to identify security risk.  By leveraging the NSX platform, authentication credentials do not need to be supplied for deep scanning of assets both online, for vulnerabilities and insecure configurations.  Users can safely scan their virtual devices in an efficient manner to avoid any VM Network "Storm" scenarios, even as virtual devices move from server to server.

The benefits from this approach are fast and accurate vulnerability assessment by scanning through the hypervisor, minimized network traffic and target scan host impact, automated setup and configuration of Nexpose to scan your virtual environment based on changing VMware NSX infrastructure, and automated security protection through VMware NSX by leveraging security-based tags created by Nexpose based upon security risk to organizations.

This solution will provide security administrators with real-time visibility into their security risk for virtual machines with reduced management overhead.

Now I know everyone is wondering when this will be available, stay tuned, we are still working hard with VMware to bring this solution to our customers.