One of my subscribers considered attending the Virtual Firewalls workshop on September 1st and asked:

Would it make sense to attend the workshop? How is it different from the Virtual Firewalls webinar? Will it be recorded?

The last answer is easy: No. Now for the other two.

The crucial difference between the webinar and the workshop is the focus:

• The webinar focuses on virtual firewall technologies and integration with the rest of the virtualized environment;
• The workshop focuses on those parts of design, deployment and operational aspects that are impossible to cover in one-way communication.

More specifically, we’ll focus on these questions and try to find better answers than It depends:

• Do you need a stateful firewall in every case or would a packet filter be good enough?
• How stateful should the firewall/packet filter be?
• Where do we need physical firewalls, and where could we use virtual ones?
• Can we replace firewall HA with vSphere HA?
• Virtual firewall placement in leaf-and-spine fabric
• Service insertion and/or chaining
• Changing security paradigm with microsegmentation
• Do we need traditional firewalls if we have microsegmentation?
• Does it make sense to use traditional firewalls on every virtualization host?

So, if you want to learn about the technology, watch the webinar. If you want to participate in a design/deployment discussion and exchange ideas with fellow networking and security engineers, register for the workshop.

Needless to say, the workshop participants get access to the webinar materials a few days before the workshop to help them prepare for the whiteboard discussions.