Entries in 'vmware'
An interesting project I ran across, it started in 2004.
From http://vcl.ncsu.edu/:
The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a remote access service that allows you to reserve a computer with a desired set of applications for yourself, and remotely access it over the Internet.
You can use all your favorite applications such as Matlab, Maple, SAS, Solidworks, and many others. Linux, Solaris and numerous Windows environments are now available to all NC State students and faculty.
Leasing custom environments to “public-ish” users via PXE or similar technology was happening in other places in 2004, but I never saw anything at this scale.
It is clear that some kind of reconfiguration/resetting happens:
What rights do I have on the VCL machine?
On custom Windows and Linux environments you have adminstrative and root level rights. Since the VCL system reloads each expired reservations with a clean environment, there is no threat of any residual data being left on a machine for the next user.
On Linux and Solaris Lab machine environments, you only have user level rights. The same premissions as you would experience at the console of a walk-in lab.
I wonder when they added the VM support mentioned at http://vcl.ncsu.edu/help/general-information/how-it-works:
The management nodes each control a subset of the VCL resources. These can be blades, virtual machines or lab machines. Currently, a set of individual blades or virtual machines can only be managed by a single management node. Typically there are anywhere from 80-120 physical computer nodes (blades) under one management node. Again the physical computer nodes can either be running a bare metal environment or a Virtual Machine hypervisor.
Here are deployment stats captured on Aug 25, 2008:
- Total blades online: 438
- Total blades offline: 87
- Active Reservations: 49
Cool.
VMware Workstation 6.0 is now availabe, see the press release for a list of new features.
One of the highlights for me is the experimental record/replay set of features. Read more about that in Steve Harrod’s The Amazing VM Record/Replay Feature in VMware Workstation 6 and for some details see this entry from Vyacheslav (Slava) Malyugin: Workstation 6.0 and the death of irreproducible bugs.
As far as I can tell this does not let you step in reverse or set breakpoints in the “past.” That has been done before, this Workstation news has me revisiting the cool paper from the University of Michigan: Debugging operating systems with time-traveling virtual machines.
Anyhow, with Workstation 6, the ability to replay a hard-to-reproduce bug over and over and step through instruction by instruction — and to have it wrapped in the nice Workstation interface — is going to be pretty useful for a lot of people (including myself).
They’ve included a number of things to make this more than a novelty like gdb integration, increasing the pace of time during replay, and the optional ability for the guest VM to itself decide when it is being recorded.
Forum users commenting on the ESX boot process at this VMTN Forum topic:
Very roughly, Linux starts up, gets to a certain point in the process where it loads a certain kernel module … that kernel module freezes the whole system, inserts ESX’s kernel as a hypervisor, then resumes Linux as the first guest OS. (The kernel module is NOT the hypervisor - it’s a mechanism to load a hypervisor). After that point, the Linux session (the Console OS, COS) continues to boot as a normal guest would, and is essentially a shell interface plus a convenient container for a few apps (like the host agent, which communicates with the rest of VI3).
and:
All of the above is a very complex way of saying that the Console Operating System, or COS, is a modified RedHat Linux distribution created specifically to interface with and manage the underlying, proprietary and unique, VMware kernel.
[…]
It becomes confusing to neophytes because of the relationship with the COS. It is usually the first thing that most see and so they incorrectly assume that they have been misled or lied to.
Massimo Re Ferre’ asks: Will Microsoft sunset VMware? (responses on the VMTN forum)
One of the parts to note is the claim in his VMware / Microsoft comparison that VMware is trying to “change the rules” by participating in the creation of a new IT platform rather than focusing on mere server consolidation. From that section:
The next frontier would be Virtual Appliances which is a very different way to develop and deploy applications compared to what we are doing today.
[…]
This is a fascinating scenario and as you can imagine it involves more than just developing a hypervisor with a management interface: it involves creating a new culture on how we deal with IT, taking all the pieces apart and rebuild our datacenters in a much more efficient way.
I ran across an interesting overview paper, Attacks on Virtual Machine Emulators by Peter Ferrie, Senior Principal Researcher, Symantec Advanced Threat Research.
Abstract - As virtual machine emulators have become commonplace in the analysis of malicious code, malicious code has started to fight back. This paper will explain known attacks against the most widely used virtual machine emulators (VMware and VirtualPC). It will also demonstrate newly discovered attacks on other virtual machine emulators (Bochs, Hydra, QEMU, and Xen), and describe how to defend against them.
A lot of the paper covers detection which I would say is different from an attack.
An interesting thing discussed is a way to use the CPUID instruction in combination with examining pages in the TLB to detect the presence of VMMs (cf. this previous entry here).
There is also a description of an authentication method that Parallels employs, a session key placed into the general registers by the guest (it also discusses a way of crashing Parallels on demand).
Slides and the paper can be downloaded from the author’s homepage.
VMware Workstation 6 Beta is available:
Dear VMware Customer,
We are pleased to invite you to the VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta Program. Workstation 6.0 includes exciting new features, including:
* Support for Windows Vista - Use Windows Vista as host operating system
* Multiple monitor display - You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors.
* Integrated Virtual Debugger - Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE
* Automation APIs (VIX API 2.0) - You can write scripts and programs to automate VM testing.
* Headless mode - You can run VMs in the background without the Workstation UI
http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/ws/
