virtualization.info Editors

Joanna Rutkowska received severe critics to its Blue Pill rootkit prototype in more than one year from security community and top representatives of virtualization community (see virtualization.info interview with Xen hacker Anthony Liguori and VMware/XenSource/Stanford/Carnegie Mellon whitepaper VMM Detection Myths and Realities).

Despite that security reseacher is still firmly resolute to demonstrate VMM undetectability is achievable.

To prove so Rutkowska started a new prototype from scratch with a new architecture and new features. Project is still in very early development phase and has some serious limitations:

• No support for VT-x (HVM implements only SVM specific functions)
• RDTSC cheating uses a very simple (too simple) cycle emulation
• Blue Chicken TimeBomb setting algorithm seems to contain a mysterious race condition that causes a BSoD from time to time after the timeboms is set
• Virtual PC 2007 (with enabled h/w virtualization) currently crashes when run inside a blue pilled machine
• BP knock feature might casue a crash in a nested scenerio due to CPUID interception.
• No support for “exotic” CPU modes
• No support for intercepting “exotic” high-precision local timers

Download the rootkit prototype and documentation here.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

In a showcase technology forum here today, IBM highlighted a breakthrough virtualization technique behind IBM’s POWER6 microprocessor with a demonstration of Live Partition Mobility, a feature that will enable the movement of computer workloads from one IBM UNIX system to another while both systems are running.

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Live Partition Mobility, currently in beta testing with general availability planned later this year, is a continuous availability feature that will enable POWER6-based servers, such as the System p 570, to move live logical partitions — including the entire operating system and all its running applications — from one server to another while the systems are running.

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Because Live Partition Mobility is implemented in the POWER6 chip, hardware and its associated firmware, the feature is operating system independent, allowing the movement of AIX or Linux operating systems and associated running workloads. For instance, using Live Partition Mobility customers will be able to dynamically consolidate UNIX or Linux workloads — without interruption — onto fewer servers during off-peak times, allowing them to turn off computers and save energy.

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Live Partition Mobility works by replicating memory pages from one partition to another in a way that is transparent to the operating system and applications running in the partition. It can thus be used to migrate workloads running on AIX or Linux operating systems on any POWER6 partition and includes support for AIX 5.2, AIX 5.3, AIX 6 and for both Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux.

The virtualization process begins with a warm-up period during which the bulk of the memory is replicated between the source server and destination partitions. A guest operating system can then be migrated from one host to another in less than two seconds without losing transactions, even when running applications with high utilization of CPU and I/O resources, such as a large database several hundreds of gigabytes in size processing thousands of transactions per minute…

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

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HP’s addition of Xen and guest operating system support for Debian to the HP Partner Virtualization Program enables independent software vendors to build and verify applications in a secure, virtualized environment. Through the program, partners have access to HP’s entire server portfolio using HP Integrity, ProLiant and BladeSystem platforms running a broad range of operating systems and virtual machines…

On its corporate blog the Microsoft Windows Virtualization Product Group informally releases some details about Virtual Server 2005 R2 (with and without SP1) configuration limits:

• Virtual Server R2 on 32bit Windows hosts – 64 concurrent virtual machines
• Virtual Server R2 on 64bit Windows hosts – 64 concurrent virtual machines
• Virtual Server R2 SP1 on 32bit Windows hosts – 64 concurrent virtual machines
• Virtual Server R2 SP1 on 64bit Windows hosts – 512 concurrent virtual machines

This is critical information to be considered before starting any virtualization project. VMware discloses limits of its virtualization solutions as well in a much more detailed document, updated at new releases time.

After VMware Fusion 1.0 release this month, Parallels monopoly on Apple market ends. Company has now to demonstrate it can sustain competition with virtualization leader and maintain its user base.

To banish any doubt, Parallels releases a beta for its acclaimed Desktop 3.0, introducing futher improvements in usability, with Mac OS Expose support, and in interoperability, with iPhone support for Windows XP and Vista guest OSes.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Parallels is also expected to start public beta of its first server product for Mac OS X Server, announced at WWDC 2007.

Windows IT Pro just published its August 2007 Editor’s Best. This year among other categories appears virtualization, where Virtual Iron wins as best product:

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To get a feel for Virtual Iron in the real world, I spoke with Paul Joncas, CEO of Meganet Communications, an ISP/managed services company with 23 employees. Meganet’s environment, characterized by many standalone servers, faced mounting space, heat, and power-usage problems. Paul tried various methods to increase efficiency and eventually faced the prospect of virtualization. He told me, “We spoke with three companies, including VMware and Virtual Iron, and we zeroed in on Virtual Iron immediately, for several reasons. First, Virtual Iron offered a lot of the same features as VMware, which was great because we felt that we weren’t a big enough fish for VMware. Second, Virtual Iron’s pricing was certainly attractive-about $600 or $700, compared with $4000 for VMware-although price wasn’t really the determining factor for us. What it really came down to was the eagerness and availability of Virtual Iron’s support for even the most minute, seemingly trivial questions. We were about to move into a totally different world, from stand-alone servers to a virtualized environment, so we obviously didn’t take this very lightly. Virtual Iron gave us all the attention we needed.”…

Along with Virtual Iron, Windows IT Pro named two finalists: Vizioncore esxReplicator and VMware ESX Server.

Read the whole article at source.

Seeking Alpha just published a comprehensive summary of VMware market positioning and financial evaluation.

It’s a good reading for any investor looking for August 13 or 14 stock launch, and should be read along with official VMware IPO webcast and virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions.

Finally VMware enters in the Apple market with its first virtualization solution for Mac desktops: Fusion 1.0.

With this product aims at taking over Parallels Desktop, which conquered Mac OS users with impressive usability. To do so VMware is exposing since first version (build 51348) a remarkable feature set which includes:

• Support for 32 and 64bit guest OS
• Support for Virtual SMP
• Support for USB 2.0
• Support for host-guest drag&drop / shared folders
• Support for seamless displaying (Unity)

Fusion supports all guest OSes that Workstation 6 alread supports. The unified Guest Operating System Installation Guide will be updated soon to include Fusion in its summary charts.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

VMware published a very interesting 19-pages paper about Exchange 2003 achievable performances in a ESX Server 3.0.1 virtual machine hosted by Dell hardware:

This paper discusses the performance and scalability of Exchange Server 2003 when it is deployed within virtual machines hosted by VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 on a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server with a Dell-EMC CX500 FC SAN.

The Heavy user profile from Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 Load Simulator benchmarking tool was used to simulate the Exchange workload. Results indicated that a uniprocessor virtual machine can support up to 1,300 Heavy users.

Our experiments also show that consolidating multiple instances of these uniprocessor Exchange virtual machines on a PowerEdge 6850 can cumulatively support up to 4,000 Heavy users while still providing acceptable performance and scaling…

Read the whole paper at source.

In May 2007 Sun published an interesting 18-pages paper about scalability capabilities of its Sun Fire X4600.

The paper is interesting mainly because Sun used VMware VMmark as benchmarking platform, joining a group of vendors (Dell was the first one) who trusts virtualization vendor measurement approach:

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The VMmark benchmark gives IT organizations a way to objectively compare the scalability of different virtualization platforms. A beta version of the VMmark benchmark was used to assess the combination of VMware Infrastructure 3 software, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, and the Sun StorageTek 6540 Array configured with varying amounts of CPU, memory, I/O, and storage resources.

The benchmark runs a highly resource-intensive workload on the server to measure scalability characteristics. The results demonstrate that a four-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server can manage twice the number of active virtual machines as a two-socket system. An eight-socket server can handle 3.5 times the number of virtual machines as a two-socket system.

The benchmark’s VMmark performance metric shows that performance scales with server capacity as well: a four-socket server scaled to 1.93 times that of the two-socket server, and the eight-socket server scaled to 3.07 times the two-socket server…

Read the whole paper at source.