Latest SMT design requires Complete Visibility by Admin! Yikes!

I just finished reading, yet another Multi-Tenancy Design/Overview that claims to be secure or trusted. While I will agree that this particular design does cover Availability and some GRC (Governance, Regulatory, and Compliance) it is severely lacking in Integrity and Confidentiality. The design even went as far as saying the cloud/virtual administrator requires “COMPLETE VISIBILITY.” I was really taken aback by those words. Why does an administrator need ‘COMPLETE VISIBILITY?’ Which leads me to the question is Integrity and Confidentiality possible within any cloud or virtual environment? Or is it purely based on TRUST?
If so this is an appalling state of virtual and cloud environment security.

Virtualization Review 2010

It is the last few days of the year and time for a review of virtualization 2010. Although VMware was founded in 1998 it was not until 2001 that I first heard of VMware and played with the workstation product to be able to run different flavors of Linux. So for me, 2010 closes out a great year in virtualization as a whole as well as a decade of virtualization and what a ride it has been.

Acadia and Its Place in the World

I can remember, in what seems like a really long time ago, about the creation of a new company, Acadia, that will support the coalition of VMware, Cisco and EMC’s vBlock product. I had really long forgotten about the new company that was going to be formed when EMC really started their hiring blitz and campaign to get all the well known talent that EMC could get their hand on. That had been the news and buzz in the industry, as well as a nonstop twitter topic speculation about who was going to be the next person to enroll in Chad’s Army as a vSpecialist. It really appeared that the EMC crew was going to be in the best position to support and sell vBlock technology.

Virtual Thoughts: Is the Hypervisor moving into Hardware?

During the Virtual Thoughts podcast on 6/29/2010, the analysts discussed various hardware aspects of virtualization trying to determine if the hypervisor was to move into the hardware? and if so how much of it? as well as whose hypervisor? and lastly such a move part of any business model?
Virtual Thoughts is a monthly podcast that looks at the entire scope of virtualization to discuss new trends and thoughts within the virtualization and cloud communities.
This weeks podcast started with a discussion of TPM/TXT and the boost it gives to virtualization security. Since TPM/TXT is based in the hardware and provides a measured launch of an operating system, the next logical discussion was on whether or not the hypervisor would be placed into the hardware?

Xsigo Forms an Alliance with CTC and Hitachi

Those of you who attended VMworld this year will remember the stack of servers and storage on display happily serving VM’s to the vistors, exhibitors and Staff at the conference, well one of the key components of that stack was provided by Xsigo. Their product the I/O Director offers signficant savings in large environments by effectively virtualising the I/O stack. I am not going to go into the ins and outs of I/O virtualization in this article. Well it now appears that they are expanding their partnerships.