On August 18, 2008, Checkpoint has announced that they will offer a “virtualized edition” (VE) of their very popular VPN-1 firewall. If you haven’t heard of the Checkpoint VPN-1 firewall, it is widely used to protect large enterprise corporations from malicious Internet attacks and also used on internal LANs to segment networks.

With the new virtualized edition, the same checkpoint firewall used in other parts of the network can be virtualized and then used to securely segment virtualized servers. The VPN-1 VE is tailored specifically for VMware ESX and ESXi environments and is preconfigured to secure them. Additionally, it has the same user interface and uses the same centralized management as other Checkpoint firewalls.

This is the first firewall that I have seen that is specifically tailored as a virtual appliance and designed to secure VMware ESX virtual networks. You can try the Checkpoint VPN VE-1 by downloading it directly from the VMware virtual appliance marketplace. The VPN-1 VE is a certified VMware appliance.
To learn more about this new virtual firewall, visit the Checkpoint VPN-1 Virtualized Edition product page.