VMWare reveals Ace in the hole
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Using its strengths in virtual machine technology, VMWare Inc. on Monday unwrapped new beta software for the desktop that allows administrators to more securely deploy and mange work environments outside the corporate network.
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Consolidate like the big boys Well entrenched in the data centers of the Fortune 100, VMware has decided to go after the little guy. The software maker this week plans to roll out a new server virtualization management bundle aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).â¦
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Both VMWare and Parallels update their virtualization software.
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(InfoWorld) - Itâs not easy being Ben Fathi. As corporate vice president of Microsoftâs Security Technology Unit, Fathi took the place of longtime STU leader Mike Nash in March amid a larger management shake-up just days after Microsoft announced that the shipment date for Vista was slipping yet again. After Nashâs high-profile tenure, Fathiâs charge is more subtle: building what he calls a âtrust ecosystemâ around Vista and its new security features and promoting the companyâs secure development practices. But first he must help get Vista out the door. Fathi sat down to talk with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul Roberts at the recent Security Standard Conference in Boston about Vistaâs progress, and the world after Vista. InfoWorld: Recently thereâs been some back and forth with Symantec about issues such as Vistaâs Kernel Patch Protection feature for 64-bit systems, as well as some public criticism of Vista code for having security holes. What should enterprise folks make of that? Ben Fathi: First, on the paper Symantec published: We thank them for their input. I think itâs unusual for a partner to go public with a paper like this on a beta product, but they did identify a few issues. To the best of my knowledge, all those were already fixed in more recent beta releases. We love to hear feedback on beta products. Thatâs why weâre in beta. Itâs a test. Weâll fix them as long as they report them to us. As for the kernel patching, we fundamentally believe that the current model of kernel patching is broken and not sustainable. We never recommended it or supported it on any version of our operating systems. As weâve been telling our vendor partners, this is the only chance we have, as 64-bit computing becomes available, to start with a clean architecture and build on top of that. We want to work with you to find ways to extend the kernel functionality by having a clean architecture, APIs, and filters. â¦ instead of patching instructions and data structures in the kernel. In the long term, what we want to do is move a lot of these functionalities to a hypervisor that sits under the kernel to make the kernel even smaller and the trusted computing base even more secure. We still have a window of opportunity here. â¦ and weâre working with two or three vendors in the space to come up with that kind of architecture. One of the other comments thatâs been made is that [Kernel Patch Protection] is anti-trust. That weâll go back in with our own products and get around it. Thatâs absolutely not true. Weâd never do that. IW: You recently patched a beta version of Vista. Is it a bad sign that youâre patching beta Vista? BF: I believe that Vista is significantly more secure than any version of XP or anything else weâve shipped in the past. Just SDL (secure development lifecycle) in general and the process of penetration testing and hardening kernel services. These all created a stronger, defense in depth strategy. What I would say is, Yeah, there will be patches and vulnerabilities as we move forward. What weâre hoping is that by creating these layers of defense, weâre giving customers, especially enterprise customers, a longer time to test and make sure things are not broken. IW: Do you see your job description and responsibilities changing after Vista? BF: There are six different areas that we call âBig Betsâ that have been identified in my division. I will mention two. The first, Application ID, is a way to identify an application that includes an executable, the library it uses, configuration files, registry settings, any patches that are applied to it. So youâll have a cryptographically signed version of the application, and youâll be able to identify that and whitelist or blacklist that. When we talk about a trust ecosystem today, the ability to trust people based on an ID and trust machines based on an ID, we canât do that with applications. If itâs called powerpoint.exe, we go and run it. So having strong IDs based on the application and [making] sure they havenât been tampered with after download is an important investment for us. The second area is isolation. Creating guest operating systems that sit on top of hypervisors allow us to create better isolation mechanisms so that even if malware comes in, it only affects one subset of the machine and not everything else. Weâve done some great work on server hypervisors and server virtualization. We need to extend that to the client. Weâre seeing partners do that already, and so weâre going to invest in that space.
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Hoping to keep the heat on archrival Microsoft, VMware on Wednesday will give developers a glimpse of an early version of its Virtual SMP product that allows a single virtual machine to work with as many as four processors, which in turn can more effectively drive mission-critical applications.
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VMware, a maker of software that enables computers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, is working on a new product to make it secure for corporations to open their networks to contractors or telecommuters.
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Virtual reality, oh ho ho As the virtualization market continues to expand, concerns over incompatibility between virtual machines from VMware, XenSource and Microsoft are unsurprisingly growing with it.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - VMware is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals Monday to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their datacenters. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them. VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical datacenter workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database, and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows. VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks. Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results. VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware. VMware is represented on the 13-member SPEC work group that is developing the virtualization benchmark along with competitors such as SWsoft and Trigence. Major technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Intel are also represented. "We have created VMmark to be an open standard," said Eubanks. "In order to prevent misconceptions of what our intentions are. ... we presented our technology preview to SPEC so they could use it as the basis of the open-standards benchmark. We want to improve our product, we don't want to cook our benchmarks." VMware is introducing VMmark while the SPEC panel is still developing its standards. "The process to becoming a standard is a quite long one," said Eubanks. But VMware has not always been as impartial as it claims to be, said John Bara, vice president of marketing for XenSource, a VMware competitor. Bara says VMware released a white paper earlier this year comparing VMware's ESX Server hypervisor to XenSource's Open Source Xen hypervisor on a Windows operating system and the results showed VMware performed better. Bara says the comparison was not fair because Open Source Xen is optimized to run best on Linux, not Windows. XenSource's Xen Enterprise product is optimized to run Windows and would be a more balanced comparison to VMware's ESX. "We cooperate with VMware in a lot of areas, but we went back to them and said 'foul,'" said Bara. To VMware's credit, he said, it redid the test and accepted the revised benchmark that showed VMware ESX and Xen Enterprise with nearly comparable performance. Also Monday, XenSource entered into an OEM agreement with Symantec Corp. to embed Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation virtualized storage management software into Xen Source's XenEnterprise virtualization hypervisor.
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VMware Inc., known for its virtual machine technology for servers and workstations, is turning its attention to the client space. The Palo Alto, Calif.
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A new open-source virtual-machine project has quickly won Linux allies, but its arrival brings complications.
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While it smooches Citrix VMworld Like the bloated engine that could, Microsoft today tried its best to garner some attention at the VMworld conference with a couple of newsish tid-bits.â¦
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In an online white paper published last Friday, VMware takes Microsoft to task for allegedly rigging the market for virtualization software to protect Windows. The paper's language and allegations recall to mind the dark days of 1996, when Microsoft was first challenged in court over its use of artificial roadblocks prohibiting Windows 3.0 and 3.1 from running in its competitor's DR DOS operating system.
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Flaw filler Wall Street darling VMware released patches that address multiple vulnerabilities in its products this week.â¦
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Turn that SAP upgrade into a virtual headache VMware this week let loose yet another management product, which pushes the virtualization specialist deeper into the data center. Say 'hello' to the beta of VMware Stage Manager.â¦
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VMware tests a desktop virtualization program that runs on a USB drive.
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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Virtualization looks tasty, but VMware is so scary -- let's shack up with another also-ran!