Virtualization and Grid Computing

Tom Scavo writes on gridshib-user:

We are pleased to announce GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.1:

http://gridshib.globus.org/downloads/gridshib-gt-0_6_1-src.tar.gz
http://gridshib.globus.org/downloads/gridshib-gt-0_6_1-src.zip

Please visit the GridShib for GT home page for an introduction and links to software and documentation:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.1/

This version of GridShib for GT is primarily a bug fix release. There is one new feature, and that is, a refactoring of the blacklisting framework that now permits the blacklisting of identity attributes (such as e-mail addresses) in addition to IP addresses and SAML name identifiers. See the CHANGES file for a complete list of changes in this version:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.1/CHANGES.txt

Along with GridShib SAML Tools v0.5.0, version 0.6.1 of GridShib for GT will be included in a Capability Kit to supplement the Coordinated TeraGrid Software and Services (CTSS) stack. This is the next step in a focused effort to deploy GridShib software at both the science gateways and resource providers throughout the TeraGrid. This work is funded by the NSF TeraGrid Grid Integration Group through a sub-award to NCSA.

Thank you for your continued support of GridShib!

For those who haven’t heard about the Xen 0wning Trilogy, make sure to check that out here and here.

In a followup post to some apparent misinformation being spread (Microsoft executive “rebuts” our research!), I was surprised by this comment:

Interestingly, if Mr. Riley only attended our Xen 0wning Trilogy at Black Hat, then he would notice that we were actually very positive about Hyper-V. Of course, I pointed out that Xen 3.3 certainly has a more secure architecture right now, but I also said that I knew (from talking to some MS engineers from the virtualization group) that Hyper-V is going to implement similar features in the next version(s) and that this is very good. I also prized the fact it has only about 100k LOC (vs. about 300k LOC in Xen 3.3).

Xen 3.3 has grown to 300k lines of code for the hypervisor?

At what point does the “tight security auditability” argument start to exponentially diminish for hypervisors in ring 0?