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Sanbolic Bridges Hyper-V And Shared Storage Networks

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Sanbolic today announced (PDF) that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines can now be stored on a single shared storage area network (SAN) storage volume using Sanbolic Kayo File System. The virtual machines can then be moved independently between physical host servers using Quick Migration because all host servers have shared access to the virtual machines.

“Kayo FS is a new product that provides file-level shared access to a SAN volume from multiple physical host servers and is designed specifically to provide a cost-effective shared LUN solution for Hyper-V virtual machines,” said Momchil Michailov, Sanbolic’s founder. “Sanbolic is already shipping Melio FS, which is an advanced clustered file system with byte-range locking that can also provide concurrent read/write access to application data on SAN storage from multiple Windows physical or virtual servers. Kayo FS is aimed at a much broader group of customers who we expect will adopt server virtualization now that it is component of the Windows Server 2008 platform.”

Sanbolic’s product portfolio also includes Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager, which are designed to support Windows applications which benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool simultaneously accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64 bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes.

These products can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware. Windows directory, reporting, and clustering features are supported. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined workloads in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.

Kayo FS will be priced at $299 per host server and sold in a 5 license bundle.

[Source: Scott Lowe]

Sanbolic

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

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So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Gene Fay Leaves EMC, Joins VKernel As Top Sales Guy

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After Diane Greene leaving VMware, in comes the story of Gene Fay joining VKernel (check our earlier coverage) as Vice President of Sales. Fay was vice president of worldwide sales and global alliances for the security  information and event management (SIEM) business unit of RSA, the Security Division of EMC. He joined EMC after the company acquired Network Intelligence where he was vice president of business development.

Gene seems to be happy with the decision he made:

“I have watched the virtualization space explode over the last five years,” said Gene Fay, “With our innovative virtual appliances for systems management, a very hot market, and a great team, VKernel offers a fantastic opportunity to work with customers who are rapidly virtualizing their data centers and partners that are helping them through the process.”

[Source: PRNewswire]

Invisible Things Lab: Hypervisors Mucho Hackable

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Security researchers from Invisible Things Lab claim will be demonstrating how easy it is to hack hypervisors at the next Black Hat conference in Las Vegas in August. More specifically, they’ll be discussing the (in)security of the Xen hypervisor, such as how to plant rootkits, how to bypass various hypervisor anti-subverting techniques, as well as how “Bluepills” (ah, that rang a bell) can be used in bare-metal hypervisor compromises. They plan on releasing proof-of-concept code.

From the Invisible Things blog:

The three presentations have been designed in such a way that they complement each other and create one bigger entirety, thus they can be referred as “Xen 0wning Trilogy” for brevity.

The three presentations that are mentioned, are the following:

  1. Subverting the Xen hypervisor
  2. Detecting and Preventing the Xen hypervisor subversions
  3. Bluepilling the Xen hypervisor

Should be interesting!

On a sidenote, this caveat in the Invisible Things Lab blog post is an interesting statement on its own:

It’s worth noting that we chose Xen as the target not because we think it’s insecure and worthless. On the contrary, we believe Xen is the most secure bare-metal hypervisor out there (especially with all the goodies in the upcoming Xen 3.3). Still we believe that it needs some improvements when it comes to security. We hope that our presentations will help making Xen (and similar hypervisors) more secure.

Do you agree?

[Source: Information Week]

Breaking: Diane Greene Leaves VMware, Paul Maritz To Become CEO and President

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VMware co-founder Diane Greene (see BusinessWeek profile) has been ousted as president and chief executive of the company and will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz (we reported on him joining EMC’s cloud computing division earlier this year), effective immediately. The company also said that while it “is not updating guidance for the second quarter, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007.” The mean estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for 51% growth to $2 billion.

Shares of the virtualization software maker went tumbling in recent trading. The stock was recently down 24.3% to $40.26 a share. Shares have fallen by two-thirds the past eight months. The stock went public at $29 and rocketed in its first two months of trading to as high as $125 a share.

On Fortune.com’s Go West blog, Adam Lashinsky writes that VMware “was so loved by investors that it singlehandedly drove the valuation of EMC, whose best move this decade may have been buying VMware before it had the opportunity to go public the first time.”

Things change. VMware stock is falling big time since the news got out.

It’s highly likely that EMC has replaced Diane Greene because of the poor revenue outlook. Also worth noting is that we reported a rumor earlier today about VMware possibly being fully spun out of EMC (which now becomes highly unlikely, considering Paul Maritz’ track record).

We’ll post more details as soon as they’re available. We’re wondering how the VMware troops will react on the news, and what will happen with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist at VMware and Greene’s husband.

This is the official take from the company’s chairman, Joe Tucci:

“As one of the founders and the leader of VMware, Diane guided the creation and development of a company that is changing the way that people think about computing,” Tucci said in the statement. “The Board thanks her for her considerable contributions to VMware and wishes her every success in the future.”

Reuters has a comment from Jefferies and Co analyst Katherine Egbert, who was disappointed the company did not hold a conference call to explain why it was cutting its revenue forecast.

“She said she suspects VMware is concerned that sales of its server virtualization software will get squeezed by new competition from Microsoft, which late last month started selling a rival product. Microsoft introduced that product, which costs far less than VMware’s offering, six weeks ahead of its previously announced launch date.”

Update: VMwareVideos reminded us of this video of Diane Greene talking about VMworld.

They also found this one featuring the new CEO and President, Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft Corp executive, reflecting on what it’s like to have Bill Gates review your stuff.

[Source: MarketWatch]

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

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A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true!  Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!