Among the flourishes it promised at VMworld Europe, VMware added vShield Zones, a new security virtual appliance for its upcoming Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) both due later this year.

The appliance is supposed to enable strict compliance with security policies and industry regulations for user data as customers adopt cloud computing.

VMware says that compliance previously required diverting network traffic to external physical appliances, resulting in disconnected islands of infrastructure.

With vShield Zones, customers should be able to create logical zones in a virtual datacenter that span all the shared physical resources, with each zone representing a distinct level of trust and confidentiality.

This should allow businesses to comply with corporate security policies and regulations on data privacy while running apps on shared computing resource pools.

VMware says traditional security products, such as firewall appliances, often require that all network activity pass through a handful of fixed physical locations to be monitored. Virtualized applications, on the other hand, can be migrated between physical hosts for higher resource efficiency and improved uptime.

Until now, companies virtualizing security-sensitive applications had to choose between leveraging virtualization capabilities such as live migration for optimal load balancing and availability, or enforcing strict security compliance. To resolve this dilemma, most customers ended up dividing their virtual environments into smaller, less efficient clusters for areas such as their Internet-facing demilitarized zones (DMZs) or consumer credit data processing systems subject to payment card industry regulations.

VMware says vShield Zones will let them create security zones in enterprises or multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, where security policies are enforced even as virtual machines dynamically migrate between hardware devices.

Deployed as a virtual appliance and integrated with vCenter Server, vShield Zones is supposed to make it easier to centrally manage and enforce compliance with security policies across large pools of servers and virtual machines. Built-in auditing capabilities should make compliance straightforward and verifiable.

VMware will still partner with security vendors.