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A Conversation About Virtualization Security, The Quotes

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Last week, an interesting conference call took place with several industry leaders in the virtualization security (virtsec) area, initiated by Virtualization.com. The panel included:

  • Joe Pendry, Director of Marketing – StackSafe,
  • Kris Buytaert – Infrastructure Architect; Open Source Expert; Principle Consultant Inuits; Blogger & editor at Virtualization.xom,
  • Tarry Singh – Sr. Consultant, Blogger, Industry/Market Analyst; Founder & CEO of Avastu & editor at Virtualization.xom
  • Andreas Antonopoulos, SVP & Founding Partner – Nemertes Research
  • Allwyn Sequeira ,SVP & CTO – Blue Lane, Michael Berman, CTO – Catbird
  • Chris Hoff, Chief Security Architect – Systems & Technology Division and Blogger – Unisys
  • Hezi Moore, President, Founder & CTO – Reflex Security

We’ll publish the highlights from our conversations shortly, but as a teaser, here are some of the most interesting quotes:

“I don’t see much point in really thinking too much about five steps ahead, worrying about VM Escape, worrying about hypervisor security, etc. when we’re running Windows on top of these systems and they’re sitting there naked.”

“We’re dealing with virtualized storage, while nobody will ever raise their hand saying they’re a security expert when it comes to that.”

“More than 75 percent of the people we asked, how are you securing virtualized environments? Their answer was VLANs. That’s where we stand today.”

“This was a network guy and his email went: WTF, you need 30 VLANS on one server? That’s the first time he became aware of virtualization. That team wasn’t even working with him. And the first inkling he had when he got a request that was just so out of the norm he just didn’t know what was going on.”

“To me, security is like bell bottoms, every 10-15 years or so, it comes back into style.”

Watch Virtualization.com for more!

IBM Releases New Storage Virtualization Software

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As part of the company’s “Project Big Green” offerings, IBM today announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.

IBM

According to the press release, the capabilities of the new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3 software can help significantly improve the

flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information across the enterprise. Storage virtualization technology can reduce requirements for additional physical storage hardware systems, which can ultimately reduce overall energy usage in the data center.

Virtualization is confirmed as one of the five pillars of IBM’s Project Big Green offerings, and a key component of IBM’s new enterprise data center model, which is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

Since its introduction to the market in 2003, IBM has shipped over 12,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,000 SVC systems.

The new IBM SAN Volume Controller 4.3 functions will be available for download on June 27, at no additional charge, and existing SVC customers will be able to take advantage of these improvements when they upgrade to SVC 4.3.

[Source: CNN Money]

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Microsoft Officially Launches Server Virtualization Validation Program

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Microsoft‘s Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was first announced in November 2007, has become operational yesterday, with the patricipation of Citrix, Sun, Novell and Virtual Iron.

The Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) is open to any vendor who delivers a virtualization machine solution that hosts Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent service packs. The virtualization solution can either be hypervisor-based or a hosted solution.

The costs associated with joining the program include membership in TSAnet at Mission Critical level, so that the vendor and Microsoft can share support information, incremental costs, if any, to perform the validation tests, and a nominal expense (currently $250) to qualify each ‘configuration’ that is submitted for validation.

Symantec Teams Up With Citrix, Enhances Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Suite

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Symantec has announced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, which it claims to be the first solution to offer advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments.

Symantec logo

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer technology. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure aims to preserve all of the key storage management benefits enterprise customers rely on in their physical environments, but are not available in current file-system based virtualization approaches.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. It uses a client/server architecture that establishes a unique, individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Since it leverages Storage Foundation, Symantec claims its users can realize all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is expected to be available in the fall of 2008 with proposed pricing starting at $4,595 per 2 socket server.

Endeavors Formally Releases Application Jukebox, Includes Free Version

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Endeavors Technologies partially released its application virtualization and delivery product Application Jukebox in early April of this year, and has now split the offer into 3 editions: Enterprise, SaaS and Lite.

Endeavors

The most notable is the Lite edition, a freely available version of Endeavors’ patented application streaming technology, designed to run all services on one server and allows administrators to publish and stream their own Windows-based applications or choose from a selection of already published applications to stream.

The Application Jukebox family of products contain three key components. Application Jukebox Player sits on the client to create the virtual application environment and provides user authentication and application license enforcement. Application Jukebox Server controls and delivers applications, provides usage monitoring and logging, plus group, user and application level administration. Application Jukebox Studio allows ISVs and IT administrators to create a streamable, virtualized “appset” from standard, Windows-based applications that is then published to the server.

Stratus Technologies Releases Avance, Integrates With Citrix XenServer for Software-Based High-Availability Solution

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Stratus Technologies has announced (PDF) its Stratus Avance software, the company’s first software-based high availability (HA) product. Using embedded virtualization and running on ordinary x86 servers, Avance claims to provide levels of availability superior to, and without the complexity of, high-availability cluster solutions for Linux and Windows applications.

Stratus Technologies

Stratus’ new software-based solution targets the SMB market as well as “edge” applications in large distributed networks where IT-staff support is minimal or non-existent. Prospective customers include medical practices, retail chains, small companies, branch banks, remote office or departmental computing, or distributed warehouses, distribution hubs or manufacturing facilities, for example.

Unlike other high-availability solutions, Avance HA positions itself as instant and automatic. Processing takes place on one server and data is simultaneously written to the mate, which can seamlessly assume
processing duties at any time should the primary server go out of service. If that happens, the affected server is removed from the network, alerts go out to user-defined recipients, a repair is made, and the server is brought back online to resynchronize with the active node with no downtime or data loss.

Avance is integrated with Citrix XenServer, and the U.S. list price for Avance software is $2,500 per server (including the license for Citrix XenServer). Avance software is available from Stratus channel partners and distributors, and in volume purchases directly from Stratus.