Intel working on hardware virtualization: codename Vanderpool

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.

A chip technology that will be available within five years, code-named Vanderpool, will allow users to partition the processor inside their computers. In a demonstration, Otellini used a PC to beam an episode of “The Simpsons” to a plasma TV, while another Intel executive booted and rebooted a game with the same machine.

“What we are doing is creating virtual machines inside the microprocessor,” Otellini said. “You can run multiple versions of Windows or different operating systems.”

Conversely, Intel will release Montecito, an Itanium chip that will be Intel’s first dual-core processor, in 2005 and follow it with Tanglewood, a future version of the Itanium family of chips for servers that will contain multiple cores.

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.

VMware Workstation 4.1 changed in 4.5 and entered RC1 phase

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!

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 45-day Free Trial Edition

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.

Excel tool to manage Microsoft Virtual Server

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.

Running FreeBSD 5.2 RELEASE on VMware Workstation

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.

Avoid VMware VMs fingerprinting

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 🙂

Next VMware Workstation release will support PXE!

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 improves traffic shaping

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!

VERITAS to Acquire Application Virtualization Firm

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.

Another player is coming? Virtualization gameplay will become crowded soon?

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

Dunes launches S-Ops 2.0

Dunes Technologies, first company launching management products for virtualization softwares as I remember (please correct me if not so), launched S-Ops 2.0.
Here some interesting new features S-Ops offers:

• Virtual Machines fail-over with shared storage (NAS or SAN): automatically runs a clone of a virtual machine on another computer in case of virtual machine error detection. Both virtual machines share a single disk file.

• Virtual Machines fail-over without shared storage: automatically runs a copy of a virtual machine on another computer in case of virtual machine error detection. Each virtual machine runs from separate copies of a disk file.

• Backup automation: put virtual machines in such mode that it can be backuped (suspend or create redo log), creates a snapshot (if available) and drives the backup software at planned intervals.

• Workload management: automatically reallocates virtual machines on multiple servers according to workload.

• Alarm notification: Threshold values and e-mail/pager notifications can be set and users will be automatically notified.

Release 2.0.1 is available immediately for Windows and Linux hosts and supports VMware ESX Server 2 and Workstation 4, Microsoft Virtual Server (beta version) and Virtual PC (beta version). Try it here.