Secure Network is an Italian consulting firm focuses on network and application security assessment. One of its partners, Claudio Criscione , is a long time columnist here at virtualisation.info. Secure Network is working on the first security assessment toolkit for virtual infrastructures, VASTO, and Criscione announced today the public beta at the Troopers conference. VASTO comes as a set of components for Metasploit , one of the most popular frameworks for penetration testing in the security industry. The framework consists of tools, libraries, modules, and user interfaces.
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In December 2009 Microsoft acquired the run-book automation firm Opalis technology. At that time the company anticipated that Opalis technology would be integrated in the System Center product family and that it would become the automation layer for Hyper-V and Azure virtualisation. Today Microsoft offers additional details about when the integration with happen: integrations packs for UNIX, Red Hat RHEL and Novell SLES Linux will be released in Q2 2010, while integration packs for Service Manager 2010, Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 R2, Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 will appear in Q3 2010. A tighter integration anyway can’t be expected before 2011 when Microsoft plans to release the next major version of Opalis.
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Now that VMware owns a technology that is far away from its primary business, the Spring Java framework and a couple of application servers, one of its primary challenges is building awareness among its customers. To do so, the company is offering complimentary and perpetual licenses (2 CPUs) of its Tomcat application server called tc Server to any customer buying other VMware products, including vSphere and View. VMware is not offering the existing editions of tc Server but a new one that integrates with the Spring framework and supports Spring applications. It’s pure speculation, but customers would rather prefer to have for free the third piece of the SpringSource acquisition: the Hyperic monitoring suite.
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While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects. The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK , an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior. Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client. It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore virtualisation EcoShell Initiative (VESI) .
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A new US startup entered the virtualisation market in mid-February: Virsto . Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis , former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP ). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest . Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of technology Development at PowerFile and Veritas – acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource – acquired by Citrix ), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware ) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).
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At the beginning of 2010 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first revision of the OVF standard , released for the first time in February 2009. OVF 1.1 includes some clarification and new components: Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface Joliet extensions for ISO transport image DMTF has also submitted OVF to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) “Fast-Track” process to develop it as an American National Standard at American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Once it is approved as an ANSI standard, OVF will be submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standardization. The list of contributors to this revision is quite interesting as it includes includes representatives from Citrix (still listed as XenSource), Dell, IBM, Microsoft NEC, Sun (soon to appear as Oracle), Symantec and of course VMware: Simon Crosby, XenSource Ron Doyle, IBM Mike Gering, IBM Michael Gionfriddo, Sun Microsystems Steffen Grarup, VMware (Co-Editor) Steve Hand, Symantec Mark Hapner, Sun Microsystems Daniel Hiltgen, VMware Michael Johanssen, IBM Lawrence J. Lamers, VMware (Chair) John Leung, Intel Corporation Fumio Machida, NEC Corporation Andreas Maier, IBM Ewan Mellor, XenSource John Parchem, Microsoft Shishir Pardikar, XenSource Stephen J.
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Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year. The list includes: Transparent Memory Compression This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region . VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks.
The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualisation hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures. Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualisation hosts. The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s. Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers. While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualisation administrators.
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The well-know virtualisation professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient . vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame. It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed. Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted.
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Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber). Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them. The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol. This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example). To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,