modusGate™ VM

Windows-based Email Security Virtual Appliance

Email Security Virtual Appliance

modusGate™ antispam gateway for Windows™ fully supports virtualized environments such as VMware®. Businesses building virtualized IT infrastructures can thus create a full Email Security Virtual Appliance for use in their network and protect physical or virtual mail servers such as Microsoft® Exchange™, Lotus® Domino® or standard SMTP servers against spam, viruses, phishing, malware and other electronic threats.

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization allows a single computer to run multiple operating systems as if they were different computers. These virtual computers are called Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Environment (VE).  Specialized and dedicated Virtual Machines (VM) such as an email security VM are often referred to as Virtual Appliances (VA), the exact virtual counterpart of a physical appliance.

VMware Ready

VMware Ready designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products.  The VMware Ready program ensures products that are optimized for VMware vSphere, interoperate seamlessly with a virtual infrastructure and have met specific VMware integration and interoperability standards.

modusGate™ has successfully passed all VMware Ready tests and review, and is recognized to be reliably inter-operable with a vSphere environment and to deliver unique features with significant value.

Try it for Free!

Try our award-winning Email security gateway software for free for 30 days, no strings attached, no sales guys calling you, no pressure. 

Need help? You will also get free consultation to our team of System Engineers to help you along with securing your infrastructure and optimizing the setup!

Virtual Appliance Benefits

Virtual environments and technologies carry many benefits:

• Optimized resource utilization
  A single physical server can host many VMs sharing the host’s resources instead of running several physical servers with independent resources.  Virtual machines with high resource requirements can also be distributed among several physical machines, according to their respective loads, in order to optimize physical resources usage.
• Backups
  Backups are quick and reliable using snapshots, making it easy to revert to a previous state. Furthermore, an IT administrator can make a complete backup of the entire Virtual Machine by copying a single vmdk file rather than running specific backup software for files, OS, databases, firewall rules, etc.
• Redundancy
  With a Virtual Machine infrastructure comprised of several physical hosts (each containing a number of virtual machines), an IT administrator can setup replication and automatic host take-over rules for optimal, reliable and fast redundancy plans.
• Dynamic resource allocation and scaling
  Since resources such as RAM or Hard Disk space are parameters of the VM, it allows dynamic allocation.  As an organization and its mailbox requirements grow, an IT administrator can assign more memory to the virtual machine instead of having to upgrade a physical server to add memory modules or hard disks, and avoid the risks and pains associated with those operations.
• Easy installation, deployment and migration
  Moving a virtual machine from a development environment to a pre or full production environment is as easy as moving a file between machines.
• Security
  Because the host operating system is invisible, hacking and exploiting a virtual machine limits the scope of the attack to the virtual machine itself.  Furthermore, because virtual machines are usually designed to perform a single function, it should be possible to limit its security vulnerabilities considerably as compared to a general purpose server.
• Less dependencies on software updates, testing and validation
  Another advantage of purpose-specific virtual machines is the lack of dependancy on services. Upgrading the web server virtual machine to IIS 7 or installing the latest security patches and updates has no effect on the other virtual machines (such as your antispam VM) and therefore involves a much more limited scope in performing quality assurance tests during an upgrade.
• Hardware and energy savings
  Since multiple virtual appliances share the same hardware, an organization will save considerably on power consumption, hardware maintenance and upgrades, monitoring, support and compatiblity to name a few.

How it works

Creating and hardening your modusGate™ Email Security Virtual Appliance can be achieved reliably using Vircom’s modusGate™ VM Howto PDF guide:

1. Download modusGate™ package
2. Place the executable setup file on the desktop of your virtual machine (guest OS)
3. Configure the Virtual Machine’s networking and firewall rules (refer to the Installation Howto PDF for complete details)
4. Install the modusGate™ application
5. Transfer your mailflow from your existing email security appliance or mail server to modusGate™ Spam Filter Virtual Appliance

Spam Filter Virtual Appliance Requirements

The guest OS (virtual machine) requires:

• Windows Server 2003, 2003R2, 2008 and 2008R2 (32-bit and 64-bit) or Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 x86, 2008 x64 and 2011 x64 with the following packages installed:
• IIS
• ASP.NET
• .NET framework 3.5
• All Windows patches must be installed

These figures are based on a simple estimate of approximately 100 messages (ham/spam) per day, per mailbox. Storage size can vary, depending on the time required to preserve quarantined items. The recommended quarantine storage time is between 5 to 14 days