The panel of the Virtualization Security Podcast on 5/27/2010 was joined by an attorney specializing in the Internet space. David Snead spoke at InfoSec and made it clear that there was more to secure multi-tenancy than one would imagine. The first question was “how would you define tenant?” which I believe is core to the discussion of SMT as without definitions we have no method of communicating. Before we get to David’s response, we should realize that nearly every one has their own definition of Tenant for a multi-tenant solution.
TVP Category Archives
Growth of Citrix and Hyper-V EcoSystems
PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.
News: esXpress is no more
Before you all go screaming to your local vendor let me elaborate, the product has just had it’s name changed to reflect a new corporate direction. esXpress is now called PHD Virtual Backup for ESX,
VMware Spring + Google: Dramatic PaaS Progress and New SMT Concerns
Java based applications can now be moved between not only a SpringSource TC-Server Java platform on VMware vSphere, but also between the same platform on VMForce, and now Google AppEngine. This level of support from VMware, Salesforce.com, and now Google is starting to make SpringSource look like the early leading technology for PaaS Clouds. This is a significant advance in the state of PaaS clouds as there were previously no examples that offered such broad support for one platform by such a diverse set of industry leaders. However as is always the case, platform advances have outstripped security, management and performance assurance capabilities.
Virtualize Java without an Operating System
When we put a .NET application on Windows on Hyper-V (or a Java application on Linux on ESXi) we are actually virtualizing twice. Can we virtualize only once, by putting the CLR or the JVM directly on the VM Host? In this action of course we remove the operating system. Oracle is taking the lead in this area with JRockit VE JVM. There is no VMware support, the only hypervisor it supports is Xen, or more precisely Oracle VM. it only comes bundled only with an Application Server, namely Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option. The entire stack inside the virtual machine is in “User Mode” in other words the JVM and the drivers are all in the same memory address space and you don’t need to switch contexts into Kernel Mode in order to perform I/O or network access. Does VMware have a strategic initiative (or even a skunkworks) to engineer a similar bundle for its SpringSource runtimes? Or are they just concentrating on scaling out with as per the Google announcement?
Secure Multi-Tenant Virtualization – How to get there?
Due to what I stated during GestaltIT’s TechFieldDay, I was invited with Bas Raayman and others to discuss Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT) in more detail with Chuck Hollis at EMC World. In addition, during one of the Keynotes SMT was renamed from Secure Multi-Tenancy to Simple Multi-Tenancy. The current Cisco VMware Netapp solution is plainly not secure. During the TechFieldDay at Cisco, Cisco even claimed “we did not think about security” when designing the initial solution. Cisco is worried about Quality of Service, I.E. Bandwidth through out the system to the disk. Furthermore, their definition of ‘Tenant’ was quite a bit different than my own. So we should first start off by defining Tenant.