One of my colleagues today called me to ask what the difference was between vShieldApp and vShieldEdge, as he was looking at a competing firewall (Juniper VGW).

For the life of me I could not explain it clearly as vmware’s website isn’t that clear about it either. I reached out to my trusted vmware SME and he was able to explain the difference to me.

vShieldApp is a hypervisor based firewall (internal to cluster) – port based ACL functionality to isolate VM’s from each other.

vShieldEdge is a virtual firewall (internal cluster or to external world) – Competitor to the Juniper VGW.

vShieldEdge also offers VPN and LoadBalancer functionality that vShieldApp is not capable of.

Tags: cloud, vmware, vshield, vshieldapp, vshieldedge