Secure Archival of Dormant VM Images

The Challenge	The IT organization of an enterprise software company manages various VM environments containing sensitive company data across its development, quality assurance and production servers. The VM images consist of Windows 2008 and RHEL 6 operating systems, running a range of applications requiring large amounts of storage (20GB to 40GB). As projects are completed, many of the test and production VM images are archived. These dormant VM environments need to be accessible to be restarted for regression testing.
The Need	The IT department needs to be able to retain the VM images for archival purposes and regain storage space, while having the ability to quickly restore the environment without compromising security.
PKWARE vZip SATISFIES THE NEED	The IT administrator uses the vZip plugin for vCenter to encrypt VM images that have been dormant for 90 days. The images are easily secured and compressed within the normal workflow, and then transferred to the appropriate VMware storage location or SAN location and labeled accordingly. The images that were 20GB – 40GB are now 1GB – 6GB, so storage space is minimized and the compressed VM images are quickly transferred to inexpensive storage in the Cloud for archival while still remaining secure and accessible.