virtualization.info Editors

Matthew Brasher, Lead Territory Sales Manager for Enterprise Solutions at Citrix, published on his personal blog a wonderfully funny, unofficial video of some Ardence 4.1 provisioning capabilities, while streaming 3 different operating systems on 150 desktops.

Absolutely worth to see.

Ardence has been acquired by Citrix at the end of 2006.

Parallels continues to improve its virtualization Desktop for Apple Mac OS, now reaching Release Candidate build 3120, and collecting successes, winning the Best of MacWorld 2007 award.

ArsTechnica reported some Apple customers preferences on Parallels over VMware, and several worldwide news sites are write VMware has limited impact on ones interested in Mac OS virtualization capabilities.

ArsTechica also published a nice interview with Ben Rudolph, Marketing Manager at Parallels, revealing some highly wanted new features in a coming major build of Desktop:

…hardware graphics acceleration is expected to come in the next major beta, which as I said in the paragraph above, will be available within the “next couple of months.” Yay! Ben said that other things we can expect are multi-core virtual machines/virtual SMP, some SCSI support, and “a more Mac-like feel.”
…
The next beta will carry even better USB 2.0 support, and there will even be iSight support within Parallels “within the next couple of weeks.” You don’t even have to wait for the next major beta for that one.

Ben told me that the next major beta will also have a more sophisticated Coherence mode…

Read the whole interview at source.

Peter Ferrie, Senior Principal Researcher at Symantec Advanced Threat Research, published an interesting 13-pages whitepaper about detection techniques malware can apply against quite all current virtualization platforms:

…
As more security researchers come to rely on virtual machine emulators, malicious code samples have appeared that are intentionally sensitive to the presence of virtual machine emulators. Those samples alter their behavior (including refusing to run) if a virtual machine emulator is detected. This makes analysis more complicated, and possibly highly misleading. Some descriptions and samples of how virtual machine emulators are detected are presented in this paper.

A harsher attack that malicious code can perform against a virtual machine emulator is the denial-of-service, specifically by causing the virtual machine emulator to exit. Some descriptions and samples of how that is done are presented in this paper…

Read the whole paper at source.

In November 2006 SANS Institute already reported about a range of malicious programs recognizing virtual machines and refusing to run inside them.

A more focused discussion about virtualization insecurities is around the popular Blue Pill proof of concept.
In an interview with Anthony Liguori, Software Engineer at IBM Linux Technology Center, virtualization.info provided a different point of view about this question.

Thanks to GridVM for the news.

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, published a useful script to verify which features the virtual CPU assigned to a Virtual Server 2005 has:

Option Explicit
dim vs, vm
‘ Attempt to connect to Virtual Server
Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
‘Get virtual machine object
set vm = vs.FindVirtualMachine(“A virtual machine”)
‘Display virtual machine processor information
wscript.echo “HasMMX : ” & vm.HasMMX
wscript.echo “HasSSE : ” & vm.HasSSE
wscript.echo “HasSSE2 : ” & vm.HasSSE2
wscript.echo “Has3DNow : ” & vm.Has3DNow
wscript.echo “ProcessorSpeed : ” & vm.ProcessorSpeed

Be sure to read original post for updates and comments.

vizioncore published a short but good whitepaper aimed to help virtualization professional in migrating from VMware ESX Server 2.x to the new VMware Infrastructure 3, highlighting 10 major steps:

1. Read all documentation thoroughly before you begin
2. Identify each virtual machine and its associated host for migration
3. Map interdependencies of virtual machines
4. Create a schedule and workflow of virtual machines in required order
5. Identify the method of migration
6. Back-up your existing virtual machines and establish a fail-back strategy
7. Always begin with a test virtual machine
8. Perform migration steps in sequential order
9. Manage your downtime window effectively
10. Leverage automation whenever possible

While some points are really given for assured, others are good advices worth to read. Download it here.

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced that their virtualization products have received IBM ServerProven certification.
…
Solutions that are ServerProven represent applications that have been enabled for IBM Systems and have been verified through a customer experience to be installed and running in a customer location. To earn the IBM ServerProven certification, XenSource verified XenEnterprise can run on one or more IBM Systems in a real-world customer environment. IBM ServerProven certification is intended for IBM customers to be able to easily identify compatible, reliable solutions for their business-critical needs. XenSource products deliver bare-metal performance on a broad-range of IBM servers, including IBM BladeCenter and IBM System x, running on Windows or Linux.

Virtual Iron was in the process to obtain same status in June 2006.

After VMware (working on VMmark), IBM and Intel (working on vConsolidate) and SPEC (working on a standard), also the popular Center for Internet Security (CIS) is developing a benchmarking platform for virtualization.

But while others focus on perfomances, CIS aims at security measurements, like it already does with several operating systems (from Windows to AIX), network devices (like Cisco routers) and back-end servers (from Oracle Database to Microsoft Exchange Server).

CIS said these benchmarks will be focused on most common platforms, but didn’t provide further details at the moment.

CIS works through a consensus process, which is open to everyone.
Who is interested in partecipating can write directly to John Banghart, Director of Benchmark Services.

J.P.Morgan doubts about real benefits of current relationship between EMC and its subsidiary VMware, as ZDNet reports:

EMC’s acquisition of virtualization software maker VMware completed in January 2004 may have been one of the better deals in the technology sector in the last three years. But perhaps it’s time for EMC to bid adieu.

…

VMware could eventually become a substantial component of EMC’s overall market capitalization. While this suggests that VMware should generate incremental value for EMC’s shareholders, EMC’s stock has not seemed to benefit from this at all.

Indeed, looking at EMC’s market capitalization from 2004 to the third quarter of 2006, we can see that our estimated value for VMware has increased from 2% of the total to 13% in 2006, yet EMC’s stock price fell 10% over the same time period…

Read the whole article at source.

Just few days ago EMC Vice President of Technology Alliances, Chuck Hollis, tried to clarify from his corporate blog why EMC and VMware relationship is so evanescent.

From last ComputerWorld survey, conducted among 252 IT executives, emerged that server virtualization evaluation is first priority of this year, beating documentation management, content security, asset management and business process management.

As soon as this technology adoption phase will finish, I bet asset management will jump at top position, given new challenges virtualization creates from this point of view.

Like previous years, also 2007 has been defined the mainstream year for virtualization:

• Garner report (obviously the report is no more available) – 2004
• (nobody liked 2005)
• Forrester report and Yankee Group report – 2006
• IDC report (already calling Virtualization 2.0) – 2007

In 2005 I said virtualization would hit worldwide interest in 2007, concurrently with launch of Microsoft hypervisor. If I’m right, and ComputerWorld is right, Microsoft, after all, may be still in time.

Dell published a very interesting (but just 7-pages long) whitepaper about their use of VMware ESX Server to manage company’s complex software development and testing cycle:

…
Dell IT has implemented virtualization by using ESX Server to support more than 1,000 test and development environments on fewer than 100 physical servers.
…
The Dell IT virtualization server farm was standardized on Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers.

These servers each have four Intel Xeon processors, 16 GB of RAM, two Emulex host bus adapters for connection to the back-end storage area network (SAN), and four Intel Gigabit Ethernet2 network interface cards (NICs) for network connections. One NIC is dedicated for access to the ESX Server service console, one is dedicated for the VMware VMotion™ feature, and the remaining two are teamed and dedicated for use by the VMs.
The SAN is a Dell/EMC CX700 storage array, with most of the VM disk files residing on RAID-5 logical units.

All servers in the farm run VMware ESX Server 2.5. The servers are divided into groups of 20 for manageability, but they share the same SAN and are managed by a single PowerEdge 2650 server
running VMware VirtualCenter 1.2…

Download the whitepaper at source.

I wonder how happy Dell could be now with VMware Infrastructure 3 and new LabManager 2.4.