WatchGuard Technologies today announced that it is extending its line of unified threat management (UTM) appliances to the virtual world. Designed for a VMware hypervisor environment, the new WatchGuard XTMv series of virtual firewalls provides unparalleled network security and advanced protection of applications and data.

“Businesses are quickly adopting virtualization as part of their strategy to stretch IT resources and budgets,” said Roger Klorese, Director of Product Management at WatchGuard Technologies. “For this reason, WatchGuard has developed virtualized versions of its XTM family so that businesses can consolidate technologies and reduce costs and complexities, while strengthening their overall security posture.”

Four editions of XTMv will be available later this quarter to meet the needs of small, midsize and large-scale distributed environments. These virtual versions provide the same type of high security offered by WatchGuard XTM series hardware appliances, including Application Control, Reputation Enabled Defense, intrusion prevention, gateway anti-virus, web blocking traffic shaping, and more.

Because multiple instances of XTMv can run on a single vSphere hypervisor, the WatchGuard virtual appliance is ideal for managed security services providers (MSSPs), hosting providers, and larger IT organisations that want to run separate logical firewalls on the same host system.

Furthermore, because the WatchGuard XTMv series can manage traffic passing within the virtual infrastructure, and even across internal networks between virtual machines in the same cluster or on the same server, XTMv is well suited to implement security policies between applications, user communities or tenants. Even in small offices with a single server running consolidated workloads, an instance of XTMv can be run on the same server to protect the full server consolidation environment.

WatchGuard XTMv will be initially supported on VMware vSphere versions 4.1 and 5.0. Pricing and availability are not being announced at this time, however a limited beta will be offered in Q4, 2011. Parties interested in participating in the XTMv beta should contact WatchGuard directly.

Klorese concludes, “Because XTMv is deployed as a virtual appliance without requiring specialised hardware, IT organisations can implement unified deployment processes in which the virtual machines constituting an application group and the security solution protecting those virtual machines—XTMv—can be set up in a single automated process.”