Produkte > Virtual Taps

The Phantom™ Virtual Tap is a landmark innovation in network traffic monitoring for virtualized and cloud computing environments. This rich-featured software Tap is a vital resource for streamlining security, management, and compliance. Tapping traffic between virtual servers (VMs) on a physical server, it delivers unprecedented total visibility into traffic passing between VMs on hypervisor stacks. The Phantom Virtual Tap replicates traffic passing between virtual network interface controllers (NICs) and pushes it out to both virtual and physical monitoring devices for maximum versatility. This Tap is the only solution on the market from a monitoring access vendor that addresses both physical and virtual environments.

A Versatile Virtual Tap from the Tap Technology Leader
The Phantom Virtual Tap marks the debut of a suite of Net Optics solutions that integrate physical and virtual networks, working seamlessly with the Net Optics Director™ series of data monitoring switches. Managed by the sophisticated Net Optics Indigo Pro™ solution, the Phantom Tap offers an intuitive, easy-to-use Web-based GUI interface for maximum control.





Solving Security, Compliance, and Management
As virtualization evolves, so do the challenges of maintaining security, cost-effectiveness, investment value, manageability and compliance. The Phantom Virtual Tap´s purpose-built architecture meets these challenges while eliminating the need for expensive dedicated new tools—pushing virtual traffic to the physical tools you already own. In fact, the Phantom Virtual Tap leverages not only physical monitoring tools but also proven physical processes and procedures to the virtual network.

Innovative, Fault-Tolerant Architecture
Requiring no changes and creating no single point of failure, the versatile Phantom Tap is VMware ESX and ESXi-certified, supporting VMware version 4.x at the kernel level. It aggregates traffic from multiple VMs and performs smart filtering, while offering the high capacity needed to match port density and traffic volumes. The Phantom Virtual Tap integrates kernel-level monitoring into the heart of the hypervisor switching system and enables monitoring and access control in dynamic and distributed virtual environments, as well as supporting "bare-metal" installations whatever the virtual switch vendor.

Keeping It Simple
The Phantom Virtual Tap integrates easily and smoothly into the virtual environment, with no interference with VMs and no modification needed in the VM. It follows VMs as they move (vMotion) among physical servers. The Phantom Virtual Tap supports best-of-breed hypervisors and virtual switches, installing smoothly and easily in the hypervisor for full traffic access and eliminating promiscuous probes or counterintuitive shaping and routing, Because it is engineered to bridge virtual traffic to physical monitoring tools, it instantly lets you find security breaches and resolve problems before they affect the integrity of your data center. This hypervisor-specific Tap also embodies the ability to manage all Phantom Virtual Taps in a cloud or grid via the comprehensive Indigo Pro management solution.




Smooth Director Integration
The Phantom Virtual Tap is built to integrate with, and forward traffic to Net Optics family of Director switches. Extending your options, this Tap is available in various bundles, as an add-on to existing Net Optics monitoring infrastructure, and as a software-only standalone solution. It embodies Encapsulated tunneling, with the Director CPU Module (DCM) terminating tunnels. DCM is sold separately.

A Scalable, GUI-Based Management Platform
The Indigo Pro Management Platform (sold separately) comprises both Indigo Manager Pro and Indigo Collector Pro for rich graphic support. Its element management and easy-to-understand dashboard lets you collect and visualize traffic statistics from large numbers of Net Optics devices for accurate knowledge of patterns and conditions across the infrastructure with full transparency and 100 percent visibility. The Phantom Virtual Tap includes a stand-alone GUI called Phantom Manager that can be used without Indigo Pro.

Doing Our Part
We are dedicated to ensuring user safety, and developing products that are increasingly environment friendly. All Net Optics products adhere to UL and CE safety certifications; FCC, VCCI, and C-Tick EMC certifications; and RoHS and WEEE environmental certifications.

Phantom for Virtual Visibility
The Phantom Solution for monitoring in a virtualized computing environment consists of four key components:
The Phantom™ Virtual Tap installs in the hypervisor of each physical server to provide access to all traffic in the server, including previously invisible inter-VM traffic.
The Phantom HD™ is a high-throughput tunneling appliance that decapsulates traffic from numerous Phantom Virtual Taps, aggregates the resulting raw traffic, and sends it at 10 Gbps for
inspection by instrumentation layer tools. Phantom HD also encapsulates raw traffic from virtual or physical devices and sends it to remote locations for processing at 10 Gbps.
The Director™ data monitoring switch is an optional component that can manage the Phantom HD, aggregate raw traffic from the Phantom HD with traffic from physically monitored sources, and filter and switch it to monitoring tools.
Physical monitoring tools are the final component of the Phantom Solution for performance, security, and compliance monitoring in the virtualized environment.

High-Throughput Decapsulation
The Phantom HD terminates tunnelled traffic from Phantom Virtual Taps or other sources. It decapsulates the traffic and defragments those packets that occasionally become fragmented during tunnel encapsulation. The Phantom HD then lays out the resulting raw traffic stream on a monitoring port that is connected to a switch such as Net Optics Director, or to another monitoring tool of choice.

Raw Traffic Encapsulation
The Phantom HD receives raw traffic from either virtual or physical devices, encapsulates it, and tunnels it over to the remote instrumentation layer for inspection. The Phantom HD supports 10 Gbps continuous throughput. This is ample for handling traffic of interest from many virtual servers on multiple hypervisors and many ESXs. Fiber SR 10 Gigabit ports provide the input for the tunneled traffic and the output for the raw traffic.

Easy Deployment
The compact, 1U Phantom HD is easy to add to your data center and simple to deploy. It can be conveniently managed by a Director CLI or by Phantom HD’s own CLI. Just plug it in, configure the IP addresses, and decapsulation begins.