VMware warns about ESX source code public posting
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Yesterday Iain Mulholland, Director of VMware Security Response Center, posted a VMware Security Note on Power of Partnership and VMware Security & Compliance official blogs.
Mulholland announced the public posting, on April 23, of a single file, containing VMware ESX source code and commentary from the period between 2003 and 2004.
The company has not officially reported which products could be compromised from this code leak or who might be the origin of the publication.
Due to ESX complexity what is clear is that the level of risk is directly related to what kind of information are contained in the published code.
If the code leaked was more service console level, versus the hypervisor or virtual machine manager (VMM) level code, then this is probably no big deal. However, if the code contains some of the more proprietary stuff, then it is a potential security risk — as well as a competitive risk if someone like Oracle, Red Hat, or Microsoft can capitalize on it.
Said Chris Ward, vice president of consulting and Integration at Greenpages, as crn.com reports.
Yesterday, April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code and the possibility that more files may be posted in the future. The posted code and associated commentary dates to the 2003 to 2004 timeframe.
The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers. VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available.
Labels: Leaks, Security, VMware
VMware announces Q1 2012 earnings
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Yesterday VMware announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2012.
Total revenue for the Q1 was $1.055 billion, up 25% from Q1 2011.
Looking in detail the informations provided we can see how license revenue has a growth, over Q1 2011, of 15% compared to a 35.3% growth for software maintenance.
Professional services, always at the end of the chain of revenue, grew a good 32.9% from $61 million to $81 million.
- Revenues for the first quarter were $1.06 billion, an increase of 25.1% from the first quarter of 2011, and 24.8% measured in constant currency.
- Operating income for the first quarter was $217 million, an increase of 41% from the first quarter of 2011. Non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $344 million, an increase of 36% from the first quarter of 2011.
- Net income for the first quarter was $191 million, or $0.44 per diluted share, compared to $126 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2011. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $287 million, or $0.66 per diluted share, compared to $204 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2011.
- Trailing twelve months operating cash flows were $2.12 billion, an increase of 64%. Trailing twelve months free cash flows were $2.07 billion, an increase of 53%.
- Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were $5.22 billion and unearned revenue was $2.81 billion as of March 31, 2012.
U.S. revenues for the first quarter of 2012 grew 21% to $485 million from 2011. International revenues grew 28% to $570 million from 2011.
License revenues for the first quarter of 2012 were $482 million, an increase of 15% from 2011. Service revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were $573 million for 2012, an increase of 35% from 2011.
“The quarter’s solid performance across our portfolio underscores the value that VMware is providing customers as they work to transform their IT organizations,” said Paul Maritz, chief executive officer, VMware.
“VMware is well positioned for growth as the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure,” said Mark Peek, chief financial officer, VMware. “Second quarter 2012 revenues are expected to be in the range of $1.10 and $1.12 billion. Annual 2012 revenues are expected to be in the range of $4.525 and $4.625 billion, an increase of 20% to 23% from 2011, and annual license revenues are expected to grow between 12% and 16%.”
Labels: VMware
Paper: VMware View and ThinApp integration with Citrix XenApp
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VMware published a technical paper titled: Integrating VMware View and VMware ThinApp with Citrix XenApp which describes how to integrate an existing Citrix XenApp installation with VMware ThinApp and VMware View.
The discussion is focused on the presentation of ThinApp virtual application through XenApp Servers to users on VMware View virtual desktops.
The paper includes an interesting comparison between Application Presentation, Application Streaming and Application Virtualization which highlights the differences in Citrix application virtualization and VMware ThinApp application virtualization.
Labels: Citrix, VMware, VMware ThinApp, VMware View, XenApp
Hotlink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.5 allows management of Hyper-V, KVM and XenServer through vCenter
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In recent times many companies are in the condition to plan the introduction of a second virtualization platform or even to have already the need to manage more than one.
Causes may be the most disparate: licensing costs, independence from a single vendor, processes optimization, etc.
Approaches to cross-virtualization also can be of different types.
There are three approaches that you can take to having one cross platform virtualization management strategy:
- Assemble as management stack from best of breed third party solutions that support both of your virtualization platforms. For example, performance and capacity monitoring vendors like VKernel (now part of Quest Software), SolarWinds, VMTurbo, and Zenoss all support multiple virtualization platforms. Application Performance Management vendors like AppDynamics, New Relic, BlueStripe, Correlsense, and ExtraHop Networks tend to be agnostic of the underlying virtualization platform. Most backup vendors like Veeam support more than one hypervisor as well.
- Standardize upon Microsoft SCOM as your management console, and then use plug-ins to SCOM (management packs) to support other virtualization platforms. For example you can use the Veeam nworks product to manage your VMware environment from within Micrsosoft SCOM. You can use the BlueStripe plugin to SCOM to manage all of the applications deployed across both VMware and Hyper-V virtualization platforms.
- Use Hotlink, to extend the reach of vCenter to Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer.
Hotlink SuperVISOR allows you to manage vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM and Citrix XenServer all through a single vCenter console. Version 1.5 adds the following functionalities:
- Snapshot Manager - Administrators can create, utilize, and manage cross-platform snapshots inside the VMware vCenter console - providing a single point of management for heterogeneous virtual machines
- Template Manager - Users are able to create and deploy a single template across all target hypervisors, eliminating the time-consuming and inefficient process of building and maintaining platform-specific virtual machine templates
- Homogenous Live Migration - VMware vCenter is now extended to provide live migration (e.g. vMotion) of Hyper-V, XenServer, and KVM virtual machines within homogeneous clusters - enabling the robust VMware management capabilities to be utilized for cross-platform, critical workloads
We recommend further reading of Bernd Harzog’s article.
Labels: HotLink, management, vCenter, VMware
VMware announces changes to its Executive Management Team
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Today VMware announced changes to its executive management team:
- Carl Eschenbach has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and Co-President. Eschenbach previously served as VMware’s Co-President, Customer Operations.
- Raghu Raghuram has been promoted to Executive Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure and Management. Raghuram previously served as VMware’s General Manager and Senior Vice President.
- Mark Peek, VMware’s Chief Financial Officer and Co-President, Business Operations, has decided to take a new opportunity as Chief Financial Officer of Workday, where he currently serves as a member of their Board of Directors. Peek will stay with VMware until June 1, 2012. VMware announced the start of a selection process for a new CFO.
VMware also announced that financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2012 are expected to broadly meet or slightly exceed the range of financial guidance it provided January 23, 2012.
vBenchmark free capacity planning from VMware Labs
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VMware Labs, a division of VMware devoted to publish free community-driven tools, has worked hard over the last months on the topics of analysis and benchmarking of virtual environments.
Among these tools, called “flings“, stand out I/O Analyzer, ESX System Analyzer and the recent vBenchmark.
The fling summary reports as follows:
Have you ever wondered how to quantify the benefits of virtualization to your management? If so, please consider using vBenchmark. vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:
- Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
- Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
- Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?
vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group. The data you submit is anonymized and encrypted for secure transmission.
We suggest you to learn more reading the Infoworld article by David Marshall.
Labels: Benchmarks, Capacity Planning, flings, VMware
Symantec Optimizes Storage I/O for VMware
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Symantec Corp. has announced Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware vSphere, the product optimizes storage I/O performances and availability providing path management and failure protection.
VMware edition also integrates with VMware vCenter Server to provide administrative and monitoring capabilities within the VMware environment.
Key Features
- Provides storage path failure protection and fast failover.
- Spreads I/O across multiple storage paths for maximum performance.
- Enhanced I/O load-balancing algorithms
- Real-time path performance metrics
Key Benefits
- Deep visibility from VMware environment reduces configuration errors and enables better decisions.
- Visibility into storage array attributes, enabling workload assignment to the right tier and type of storage
- Detailed path performance metrics available within VMware vCenter
- Datacenter I/O visualization provides insight into I/O demands of individual guests
- Broad compatibility list enables choice of storage vendors without compromising on manageability
Symantec has also announced, in the press release, an agreement with NetApp, Inc. to resell Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware to take advantage of the sales channel offered by a comprehensive NetApp storage solution.
Labels: NetApp, Storage, Symantec, VMware
VMware Octopus goes to Apple Store
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On April 2 VMware released his iOS App related to Project Octoups.
Its description, extremely succinct, suggests how VMware wants to keep a low profile on this new project.
Project Octopus enables secure, anywhere access to files from any device. Users can share and collaborate on their files with anyone inside or outside the company.
The App is only available to members of the Octopus private beta, but the few screenshots available push to an immediate comparison with the Dropbox App.
Source: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-octopus/id509253425
vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 is now available
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On March 19 VMware announced the availability of vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 that provides configuration management capabilities within VMware vCenter Operation Management Suite.
The primary theme for vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5 release is “Cloud Ready”. New capabilities within this release significantly increase the ability of the Virtual Infrastructure team to ensure that their VMware Infrastructure is properly configured to meet the rigorous demands associated with virtualizing business critical workloads; including addressing requirements associated with VMware’s own hardening guidelines.
What gives more value to this release is the introduction of Change Management Dashboard, an high level dashboard that allows easily to track changes in configurations of VMware Infrastructure by product type and magnitude.
In addition to this monitoring features vCenter Configuration Manager provides the ability to make bulk configuration changes across vCenters and to create compliance templates that grant continuous hardening of the systems involved.
Other significant enhancements to vCenter Configuration Manager in this release include:
- Ability to create machine groups within vCenter Configuration Manager based on organizational constructs (clusters, virtual datacenter, application trust zones) within vCenter, vCloud Director and vShield.
- Support for configuration and compliance management for virtualization specific constructs such as templates and offline VMs (via VMware vCenter Orchestrator workflows delivered separate from the release)
- The ability to snapshot a VM before making a configuration change
- Support for the “Security Content Automation Protocol” (version 1.0) - important to federal agencies
- A new REST based API that will allow vCenter Configuration Manager to more fully participate in VMware and 3rdparty ecosystem solutions
Labels: Configuration Management, Release, VDI, VMware
VMware shows his vision for the Post-PC Era
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On March 9, VMware published a paper, intended mainly for business decision-makers, where tries to explain its vision of VDI future in terms of cost & time savings.
An important step is where the author rationalizes the entire product portfolio that VMware puts on the market (now or in the near future) to complete his vision:
- VMware View: Virtual desktops as a managed service
- VMware ThinApp: Virtual applications as a managed service
- Project AppBlast: HTML5-based delivery of legacy applications via a web browser
- Project Octopus: Secure data share and sync
- Horizon Application Manager: Now, policy-based management of applications (SaaS, web applications, ThinApp virtualized Windows applications, and enterprise applications). Soon, policy-based management of all public and private cloud services (desktops, applications, and data).
- Horizon Mobile: A secure, managed, and policy-driven virtual smartphone for work, isolated and protected inside a personal smartphone
Cloud-based social/collaborative applications, designed for mobility:
- Zimbra: Open-source email and collaboration
- Strides: Social task management
- Socialcast: Enterprise social networking
- SlideRocket: Online presentation software
The paper then covers 7 main points that VMware considers key challenges for future VDI implementations:
- Desktop hardware and software deployment
- User administration
- Image and application management
- Desktop patch management
- Desktop data security
- Desktop disaster recovery and data backup
- Desktop help desk and support
and concludes:
“A VMware View virtual desktop solution resolves many of the economic and user satisfaction issues of a desktop environment. A View deployment saves an average of 7 hours of labor per user desktop per year, out of 12.2 hours labor per user on a physical desktop per year. This is a 57% decrease in labor costs with a VMware View implementation. Multiply the 7 hours by your number of users, and the time available for other projects is a convincing argument for virtual desktops.”
Source: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10259
Go Que vs The World