virtualization.info Editors

Directly from 19 January announcement:

VERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq: VRTS), the leading storage software provider, today announced expanded Linux platform support for SUSE LINUX and VMware
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VERITAS Cluster Serverâ„¢ is now available for VMware ESX Server, providing customers the first high availability option for VMware. Combining clustering, core storage management and server provisioning technologies, VERITAS delivers the fundamental building blocks for utility computing with heterogeneous availability, performance and automation software on all platforms, including Linux.
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VERITAS Cluster Server is the first clustering software to make VMware ESX Server host and virtual machines highly available. VMware allows multiple instances of Linux, Red Hat or SUSE LINUX, Microsoft Windows and Novell Netware to run on a single Intel x-86-based server. VERITAS Cluster Server for VMware can monitor each of the virtual machines within the VMware ESX Server and failover any of the machines to another node in the cluster, or to an entire server in the event a server fails.
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For new customers, pricing for VERITAS Cluster Server for VMware starts at US $1,995 per Linux client.

Taken from a CNet article:

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker wants to take advantage of the huge number of transistors on the microprocessors coming out in the next few years. The company plans to produce chips with two or more processor cores–the calculating engine inside a chip–and make chips that can function as two processors, company President Paul Otellini said Tuesday morning at the Intel Developer Forum here.

The dual-core concept also will show up in the Xeon line in the form of Tulsa, which will be released in about three years. Xeon is based on the traditional x86 architecture, which differs from the Itanium architecture.

Yeah, I know it’s an old news but never reported before in my blog, so here it is.

Even if I’m not allowed talkin’about beta products (you know…NDA agreements as usual) sometimes VMware users helps me disclosing informations 🙂

This time a post appeared in vmware.for-windowsnt.experimental newsgroup publicily reveals that Worstation product entered in RC1 phase (build 6979). User who posted this info is also referring to the product as Workstation 4.5 and not 4.1 as expected. So probably VMware decided so many changes were in place to relabel final product.

Anyway be ready: gold version is coming!

Do you have this system requirements?

Processor: Athlon®, Duron®, Celeron®, Pentium® II, Pentium III, or Pentium 4
Processor speed: 400 MHz minimum (1 GHz recommended)
RAM: (depending on how many GuestOS would you run)
Available disk space: (depending on how many GuestOS would you run)
Other: Level-2 cache and CD-ROM required
Operating System: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Then you can download here and try from yourself how good Microsoft virtualization technology is.
Consider also reading the evaluation guide.

Well, you know, Virtual Server isn’t yet released, but Microsoft community is already very active around it. I cannot disclose much about it since NDA beta program agreement obliges me to.

What is important here to say is that Virtual Server will require some OS components to let you administer virtual machines. This could be something problematic for some of us, or simply unwanted.
Is the case of an actual Virtual Server beta tester, Andrey Slanin, who created and publicily distributed a great Excel tool to replace official Microsoft VMs management. You can grab it here.

At today I dunno if it also works with Virtual PC 2004. Andrey will inform me when tried or eventually adapted. Meanwhile you could just try from yourself 🙂

P.s.: all authorizations to Microsoft and Andrey are obtained, before writing this post.

FreeBSD 5.2 RELEASE is just been released and if you like installing it on your VMware Workstation virtual machine (I tried on 4.0.5 version) you’ll need a little hack to make it works.

After defining a new VM with defualt FreeBSD settings don’t start it, but power it off. Now open new .vmx file just created and add on bottom this line:

monitor_control.disable_apic=”TRUE”

Now you can install and run it without further problems. Thanks to Joe Landers for this trick posted on vmware.guest.misc newsgroup.

A very widely used practise among IT Security professionals is to work with virtual machines for different purposes: one of this is so called forensic analysis. Forensic analysis often gain advantages by relatively new security tools called honeypots.

Honeypots deployment and use suffers of few basilar problems:

1) to attract network attackers simulating an interesting traffic
2) to deploy many victim-designed machines with different operating systems (physical space, money availability, audit and managment)
3) to analyze compromised victim-designed machines (this is forensic analysis) to discover new attack tools and methods

Virtual machines technologies mitigate these problems very well so it’s not so rare to see large VMs deployments (eventually in so Honeynets) for forensics purposes.

But virtual softwares adoption brings new and different problems.
First of all VMs fingerprinting: an attacker arriving at a virtual machine (in the network segment where is deployed or in the VM itself), before compromising, can eventually discover it and leave without action. For this reason virtualization community is trying to modify in some ways virtualization softwares and disguise VMs.

A last hour solution is posted by Kostya Kortchinsky, a French Honeynet Project member, on security mailing list Honeypots hosted by SecurityFocus.com.
Kostya posted a C patch (in attachment to his original post) working with VMware Workstation 4.0.5 for Linux which has many interesting modifications:

– names of the IDE devices (HD & CDROM)
– names of the SCSI devices (HD & CDROM)
– PCI vendor and device ID of the video adapter
– I/O backdoor

Absolutely interesting, but just remember: patching VMware products totally invalidate company support. So if something doesn’t work anymore don’t call VMware guys 🙂

One of the most wanted features VMware community asks for (whole virtualization community indeed…) is virtual network cards PXE compliancy.
Petr Vandrovec, a skilled and very active newsgroups supporter, revelead in a post reply on vmware.guest.misc newsgroup that VMware Workstation 4.1 (currently in beta) will fully support PXE for AMD PCnet and proprietary VMXnet virtual NICs.

This greatly enhances VMware possibilities!

m0n0wall (a liveCD FreeBSD based distribution for firewalling and routing purposes) is at today the simplies and cheapest way to have one or more routers in a virtual infrastructure: just download the ISO, prepare a virtual blank (and formatted) floppy for configuration storing, configure it with the neat PHP webGUI, and go on.

One of the most powerful and wanted features m0n0wall provides is traffic shaping: with the new pb24 release you can handle multiple traffic shaping rules (top-down architecture), pipes and queues.
To better undestand queues rules power take a look at relative FAQ.

I tried many linux distro but nothing is comparable with m0n0wall (I just wait for RIP/OSPF support somedays…). Thanks Manuel!

As ASPnews reports:

VERITAS Software on Wednesday moved to acquire application virtualization concern Ejascent for $59 million in cash to bolster its utility computing strategy to better compete with IBM, HP and EMC.

Application virtualization software, such as Ejasent’s core UpScale product, allows IT employees to move an application from one server to another without disrupting or terminating the application. UpScale takes a snapshot of an application, preserves its settings and data and transfers it to a different server in near real time.
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Another player is coming? Virtualization gameplay will become crowded soon?

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Thanks to Stephane Broquere (Dunes) for reporting me this interesting news