Year: 2010

In preparation for the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the North Carolina State University and IBM presented a new project called HyperSentry: a system to measure the integrity of a running hypervisor that address the shortcomings of other solutions like Copilot, HyperGuard, HyperCheck and Flicker.

Unlike existing solutions for protecting privileged software, HyperSentry does not introduce a higher privileged software layer below the integrity measurement target, which could start another race with malicious attackers in obtaining the highest privilege in the system. Instead, HyperSentry introduces a software component that is properly isolated from the hypervisor to enable stealthy and in-context measurement of the runtime integrity of the hypervisor. While stealthiness is necessary to ensure that a compromised hypervisor does not have a chance to hide the attack traces upon detecting an upcoming measurement, in-context measurement is necessary to retrieve all the needed inputs for a successful integrity measurement.

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Virtual Bridges just announced the release of VERDE 4.2. The features provided in this new minor update are significant.

First of all Virtual Bridges developed a VDI client for the Apple iOS: called iVERDE, the application should appear shortly on the AppStore for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.
The company built iVERDE on the open source iDesktop project. iVERDE, which has been released under the GPL open source license too, supports remote connection to Windows XP, 7 and Linux virtual desktops.

VERDE 4.2 also includes a new way to provision virtual machines from a so-called gold master image by leveraging Microsoft Active Directory.

VERDE 4.2 also includes support for two-factor authentication products, including RSA SecureID, Safeword and other solutions based on RADIUS.

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With the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware announced a new “per-VM” licensing model that will take effect starting September 1.

The new licensing will be applied to most management products, including vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vCenter CapacityIQ.
It won’t extend to vCenter Server for now but there’s no reason to believe that VMware will make this exception forever.

iTnews published an interesting piece earlier today about how the per-VM model is impacting the VMware Service Provider Program: while most providers already switched to it, some of the smaller ones are in trouble.
The key point is that the new licensing may negatively affect those companies that have very high consolidation ratio.

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A little more than one year ago, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, reached unprecedented popularity with the launch of its Server Virtualization Evaluation Criteria.
The evaluation criteria was used to compare Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtual infrastructures on over 60 features and Burton Group became the first analysis firm to declare that XenServer 5.5 plus Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition was as enterprise-ready as VMware Infrastructure 3.5.

In May, Burton Group also released a Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria. The company avoided to call it Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) despite it’s a de-facto terminology because it was originally launched by VMware.

The new report compares Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.01 against over 100 features, but none of them achieved the score to be considered enterprise-ready.

Fast forward to last week: Citrix submitted XenDesktop 4.0 Platinum Edition with Service Pack 1 and Burton Group declared it the first enterprise-ready VDI solution available on the market.

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Now that the SPEC has finally released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware and OS virtualization platforms, customers may believe that there’s no more need for the VMmark proprietary framework that VMware released in July 2007.

VMware has a different opinion and last week announced the public beta of VMmark 2.0.

While SPECvirt_sc2010 and VMmark 1.x measure the performance of a single virtualization host, VMmark 2.0 has been designed to benchmark a whole virtual data center.
This implies measuring complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment.

On top of that, VMmark 2.0 also features more resource-intensive workloads, including:

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At the end of the last week the US startup PHD Virtual published a video previewing the upcoming support for vSphere Hypervisor (formerly ESXi) in its Backup product.

Now that VMware is just one release away from dropping ESX completely, all partners must work quickly to introduce support for its COS-less alternative.

For the ones who are wondering, it’s unlikely that PHD Virtual will be able to support also the free edition of ESXi. The first company that tried to do so, Veeam, received a kind request from VMware to stop altogether.

The video is embedded below:

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ChangeBASE is a UK firm focused on automated application compatibility testing and remediation software.
Its flagship product, AOK, is made of several modules, including Virtualise-It.

Virtualise-It allows AOK to recognize which applications can be virtualized with different application virtualization and presentation virtualization technologies by looking for non-supported drivers, hard-coded references, non-supported network updates, middleware dependencies, Windows Vista/7 compatibility, etc.

So far the module supported Microsoft App-V and Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Citrix XenApp, and Symantec (formerly SVS).
Last week the company also announced support for VMware ThinApp.

Despite it’s not a public company, Veeam recently started to update about its growth every quarter. 
Of course the financial results are missing or incomplete, and the announcement is primarily to promote its newest products, but the exercise is still useful to understand if the company is in good shape or not.

Almost 2,330 new customers won in Q2 2010 certainly don’t seem a bad result, even if Veeam is not providing any hard number about them.
Overall the company revenue grew 166% year-over-year, with a 145% growth for licensing booking revenue.
Veeam has now more than 12,000 customers worldwide.

To put things in perspective: the Veeam’s biggest competitor, Vizioncore, reported 19,000 customers in Q4 2009, and 25,000 customers right now.

VMware released vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 in October 2009, introducing support for vSphere 4.0 and for twelve vendor that offer Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS storage replication solutions.
Actually a 2.0 product, SRM has been updated again to 4.0.1, then to 4.0.1.1 in March, and again last week to version 4.0.2 (build 272342).

But with the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware also released SRM 4.1 (build 267817), which introduces a few new features:

• Capability to change guest operating system shutdown retry timeout when customizing IP address during recovery, and change datastore discovery timeout during recovery
• Support for networks backed by a VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) at the protected and recovery sites.
• Support for IP customization of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and the vCenter Solution Licensing

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At the end of last week Microsoft published a useful paper titled: Planning, Implementing and Supporting SQL Server Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration.

The 53-pages document provides guidance for planning and implementing SQL Server 2008 R2 on Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machines ready for Live Migration.
It’s divided in four parts that require the use of multiple System Center products such as Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 and Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010:

• Planning (which includes the use of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit)
• Implementation (which includes physical to virtual (P2V) migration of existing physical SQL hosts through SCVMM)
• High Availability and Live Migration
• Ongoing Operations and Support