Hypervisor

Sun Microsystems Inks Bunch Of New OEM Agreements To Expand xVM VirtualBox Reach

August 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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Sun Microsystems today announced new multi-year OEM agreements with Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech to expand the reach of Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Sun xVM VirtualBox is available via the OEM program or in a free, open source version here. Since its release in January 2007, Sun xVM (VirtualBox) has surpassed 5 million downloads, and the company boasts about it being the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Sun xVM VirtualBox software, which it acquired through its maker innotek earlier this year, is a key component of Sun’s broader xVM virtualization and management software portfolio, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center, Sun xVM Server and the Sun VDI Software.

Avanquest will produce and publish Sun xVM VirtualBox bundled with OpenSolaris and sell it via retail outlets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Beginning this fall, Avanquest will provide Mac users with a solution to run the Windows operating system through Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Q-layer is leveraging Sun xVM VirtualBox to deliver complete datacenter virtualization capabilities for its customers.

Zenith InfoTech has built its network attached storage appliance for small and medium-sized businesses using Sun xVM VirtualBox.

TRANGO Virtual Processors Embeds Hypervisor In Texas Instruments’ OMAP3430 Processor

July 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

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TRANGO Virtual Processors, provider of embedded virtualization IP, delivers greater isolation and portability of operating systems and drivers on the Texas Instruments OMAP 3 platform. The TRANGO Hypervisor offers a broad choice of operating system (OS) and real-time operating system (RTOS) including Linux, Windows Embedded CE, Symbian OS, eCos, uC-OSII, uITRON and other proprietary RTOS, while the OMAP 3 platform, based on ARM Cortex-A8 processor, offers up to 3X performance gain over ARM11 based processors.

Leveraging TI’s OMAP3430 multimedia applications processor, the TRANGO Hypervisor is the perfect fit for mobile platform designers who want to find the optimal balance between the effective reuse of legacy features, the development of new functionality, the secure sharing of common hardware resources, time-to-market, and cost constraints.

With secure platform virtualization, OEMs benefit from an inherently secure architecture, easier porting of a rich OS or RTOS to the hardware, and highly portable drivers. On the TI OMAP3430 processor the TRANGO Hypervisor offers the ability for OEMs to reduce or even eliminate driver changes in moving from one OS platform to another OS platform, with a positive impact on the resultant development and validation effort.

The TRANGO product is available on the ARMv5/ARMv6/v7 and MIPS32/MIPS64 embedded architectures, supports a broad choice of OS and RTOS including Linux, Windows Embedded CE, Symbian OS, eCos, uC-OSII, uITRON and other proprietary RTOS. It is shipped with a complete SDK and tool suite based on Eclipse.

[Source: Marketwatch]

Citrix Aims To Make Creation of Hypervisor-Independent Application Workloads Easier with Project Kensho

July 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Citrix today announced “Project Kensho,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments.

Citrix boasts this implementation will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines. Users will be able to easily install and use any OVF packaged application workload regardless of which virtualization platform they use – whether it be XenServer, Hyper-V, or ESX.

“XenServer delivers the benefits of fast, free, ubiquitous and compatible virtualization, whether from Citrix, Microsoft or VMware,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Project Kensho highlights the Citrix commitment to interoperability for virtualization, while maximizing price/performance and richness of features at the virtual infrastructure level.”

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. The companies then jointly submitted the draft to the DMTF standardization process.

Project Kensho will support the vision of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, helping customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. The tools developed through Project Kensho will be integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio based orchestrations, for example, to provide an automated, environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.

A technical preview of Project Kensho tools is expected to be available for free download in September 2008.

Phoenix To Integrate HyperSpace into NEC Notebooks

July 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Phoenix Technologies announced that NEC will be among the first PC manufacturers to integrate Phoenix HyperSpace, a virtualized operating environment that enables instant-on applications running independently and alongside Windows. NEC has signed an agreement with Phoenix which will allow it to deliver “unprecedented levels of security” for its notebook customers, enabled by HyperCore, Phoenix’s firmware-based hypervisor.

The Phoenix HyperSpace environment includes ManageSpace, which enables security applications to operate before, during and after Windows Vista boots up and shuts down. As a result, NEC notebooks will be secured before malware gets downloaded by Windows applications. This is possible because virus definition files are updated in ManageSpace while preventing Windows access to the network.

Invisible Things Lab: Hypervisors Mucho Hackable

July 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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:

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]

Hyper9 Comes Out Of Stealth, Focuses On Letting You Find And Manage Virtual Machines

June 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Hyper9, formerly known as InovaWave, provider of search-based software for virtual environment management, today announced its first product, carrying the same name as its parent company. Hyper9 will be free to download in September.

Hyper9, a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas, leverages a “Google-like” search engine to access both real-time and historical data on everything from the guest operating system to the physical infrastructure, then presents that data via a “next-generation” user interface. As a result, Hyper9 claims this approach supports faster troubleshooting, comprehensive monitoring and detailed reporting on the performance, configuration and utilization of virtual environments.

“Just as virtualization is transforming traditional computing, Hyper9 is ready with a truly scalable, flexible and intuitive approach to managing these dynamic environments,” said Chris Ostertag, president and CEO of Hyper9, Inc. “Hyper9’s unique architecture ensures that it can adapt to and accommodate the continually changing nature of virtual environments even as they gravitate to more hybrid states.”

The initial Hyper9 virtual appliance is designed to work only with the VMware ESX environment. Later versions will work with additional hypervisors, the company announced.