This past weekend, there was some online discussion about security flaws in the Xen open source hypervisor. Specifically, it was reported that there is a vulnerability in Xen which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

I want to make sure everybody who is using Virtual Iron or is thinking of using Virtual Iron knows that this flaw does not impact Virtual Iron software at all.

The vulnerability mentioned is caused due to an input validation error in tools/pygrub/src/GrubConf.py. This can be exploited by "root" users of a guest domain to execute arbitrary commands in domain 0 via specially crafted entries in grub.conf when the guest system is booted. Source: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/26986/

While Virtual Iron incorporates the Xen open source hypervisor, our software is not impacted by this vulnerability at all.
- Virtual Iron does not grant any user access to dom0.
- Virtual Iron does not use GrubConf.py. It is not even present in our dom0.
- Virtual Iron supports only unmodified operating systems (HVM). GrubConf.py is used to bootstrap paravirtualized guests.

Questions? Let us know here or in the forums.

Virtual Iron launched a new research survey this week aimed at defining the IT infrastructure needs of hosted service providers and the role of server virtualization in reducing their data center operational costs, increasing management flexibility and improving service levels. The brief survey is available here. All respondents will be automatically entered in a drawing for a new Apple iPhone.

Respondents should be involved with at least one of the following business types:

- Website hosting
- Application hosting, software as a service
- Outsourced servers (shared or dedicated environments)

We will publish the findings of the survey results and make them available on our website,

For a variety of reasons, you may need to reassign the IP address of your virtualization manager. Maybe you're moving from a test environment to a production environment or are moving to a different subnet. Whatever the reason, it's easy to change the virtualization manager's IP address. You can do this in just five easy steps:

1. Stop the virtualization manager

2. Change the IP address of the dedicated network in the virtualization manager system via the host operating system

3. Copy VirtualizationManager\etc\dhcpd.conf_default to VirtualizationManager\etc\dhcpd.conf

4. Copy VirtualizationManager\etc\dhcpd.leases_default to VirtualizationManager\etc\dhcpd.leases

5. Re-start the virtualization manager and reboot all of your nodes

A good article from Network World on using virtualization to boost efficiency and save on energy costs:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proclaimed that data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006. That’s roughly 1.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption and is worth about about $4.5 billion.

and

Applying virtualization technologies across all system assets, including servers, storage and network devices, can allow companies to tap into unused capacity without adding resources that draw more power. The most energy-efficient equipment is equipment that’s no longer in use, whether it’s a server, a router or a storage device.

The full article is here.

SearchServerVirtualization has a new article up on virtualization and storage, which you can find here.

Plan your strategies prior to planning virtualization.
What is the resource optimization strategy for your data center? Do you have a disaster recovery strategy? While virtualization holds the promise of centralized management and leveraging lower-cost storage, you must first understand where your data center is headed overall. Virtualized storage is simply one tactic to be leveraged in the context of achieving the goal of operational optimization. For example, how many data centers are you going to have? Which functions will each one serve and where will they be located? What existing storage resources do you have, and what future storage needs are you facing? How will you manage daily storage, data protection, archival and disaster recovery tasks?

Full article at SearchServerVirtualization.

Over the next few weeks, we will be hosting two webcasts that will discuss Virtual Iron 4's features and benefits. In addition to a demo of the new features, there will be time for Q&A and additional discussion.

You can register here for the October 16 webcast and here for the October 25 webcast.

Here's the description from the registration page:

Version 4 extends Virtual Iron’s price, value and performance advantages over all other server virtualization solutions. Key new capabilities and features include:

- Integrated SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Kernel and Drivers - Version 4 integrates the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 kernel and Linux drivers in Virtual Iron’s core virtualization architecture. As a result, users get all the benefits of complete Novell certification and corresponding full global commercial support for their entire spectrum of server, storage and networking hardware supported by Novell in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This includes systems from IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Network Appliances, Cisco and many others. Virtual Iron joins VMware as the only server virtualization providers to integrate fully supported kernels and drivers with its hypervisor - a critical requirement for users moving virtualization into production environments.

- LiveConvert™ - P2V and V2V Conversion Capabilities Powered by PlateSpin - Version 4 adds LiveConvert, an automated software solution powered by PlateSpin that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. LiveConvert provides Virtual Iron users with the ability to quickly migrate workloads between physical servers and virtual machines allowing users to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation, rapid provisioning, high availability and capacity management.

- New Graphical Management Console and Interface – Version 4 adds a powerful new Windows graphical administration console including new management wizards for creating new virtual machines and managing their entire lifecycle. The console also includes new graphing and reporting tools for measuring resource utilization and performance including CPU, memory, disk and network I/O. These capabilities simplify management of the entire virtual environment.

- New Xen® 3.1 64 Bit Hypervisor – Virtual Iron continues to contribute to and leverage the latest advancements in the Xen open source project. Version 4 integrates the Xen 3.1 hypervisor for increased scalability, increased memory density, support for up to 128 GB of physical memory, and per guest virtual machine limits of 32 GB. The new hypervisor also supports up to 8-way SMP per guest and leverages ACPI to support dynamic hot plugging of CPU, network and storage running into virtual machines. As a result, users can support a larger number of virtual machines per host, increasing utilization and ROI.

- Expanded OS Support - Virtual Iron Version 4 adds support for several new 32 and 64 bit operating systems including Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. This enables Virtual Iron to continue to expand mainstream adoption, provide support for diverse data center environments and increase user flexibility and value.

- Windows SMP Support - Version 4 expands support to virtual machines with up to 8 CPUs, for the ability to virtualize more demanding workloads such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.

Internet News is asking whether virtualization will spell doom for server sales:

The promise behind virtualization has long been that one well-equipped server could do the work of several. So what happens once customers begin following that idea -- and buying fewer servers?

That scenario is cause for concern, according to industry analyst Infiniti Research. This week, the firm published a study indicating that server sales will trail off in coming years, and even decline, as virtualization reduces the need for physical hardware.

It's a popular theory: people consolidate servers and will need fewer servers. Of course this is true. But people will continue buying new servers and higher-end servers for quite a while.

Gartner has released a list of the top ten technologies for 2008.

Coming in at number five is virtualization:

5. Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads.

More information on the ten technologies in this ZDNet article.

I'll be speaking at the Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West on November 12 out in San Francisco. More information can be found here.

More on the overall conference can be found here.

I came across this post from a user who is testing out Virtual Iron:

The setup is wonderfully simple, write an ISO to disc, and boot from it, then walk through a simple configuration menu for network setup etc and it installs a SLES distro with the hypervisor & tools. No manual installs, no gritty code compiling - all very user friendly. When the machine has been configured and restarted, browsing to the given IP in a web browser brings a welcome page with links to documentation, logging, Administration Manager (license keys etc) and Virtualization Manager java applications.

The full post is here -- I'm glad to here of the simple installation. We strive to make the Virtual Iron experience as easy as possible (we know that users of our software have lots of things going on all the time) and it's always encouraging to hear that we're accomplishing our goal.

Over on the forums, mikeh has posted a handy guide to changing the MTU on your Virtual Iron 4 Nodes.

Thanks to mikeh for posting. We hope that others find it useful.

Yesterday, we annouced that Virtual Iron is being bundled with select IBM System x and HP ProLiant servers. For more information on the specific announcements, you can read the press releases.

These bundles are pre-configured to offer you a "ready to use" virtualization solution.

More specific information on the virtualization bundles can be found at these two links:
IBM and Virtual Iron Bundles
HP and Virtual Bundles

The Virtual Iron Administrator's Guide is now available online in convenient HTML format.

Fully searchable, with an easy-to-use index, I think that this version is a bit easier to use than the PDF version (though, of course, the PDF is easier to save locally and to print for reference).

Virtual Iron 4.1 is now available for our enterprise editions as well as the single server edition. Some of the new features in 4.1 include 64-bit Windows 2003 support (which has been much requested), the Windows VSTools installer is now available as an MSI to simplify automated deployments and 64-bit Linux timekeeping improvements.

Head over to our web site to download.

With the release of Virtual Iron 4.1, we've made the Getting Started Guides available online (both are also available in PDF format still):

Enterprise Edition Getting Started Guide (PDF version)

Single Server Edition Getting Started Guide (and the PDF version)

We are hosting two webcasts this week:

This Thursday at 11am, you can learn more about Virtual Iron's latest release in a webcast hosted by our director of product marketing, John Kelly. You can can register for this webcast here.

Also this Thursday, we are presenting a case study webcast at 2pm:
Hobson's EMT Case Study - Server Virtualization for the Rest of Us Webcast - Register

The description for this webcast is:

Server virtualization promises great benefit and ROI, but to date, available solutions have been too expensive and too complex, especially for small and medium-sized business and not-for-profit organizations with tight budgets and limited staff.

You’ll hear from Hobsons EMT, a company that is gaining all the benefits of server virtualization and management at a fraction of the cost. Patrick McFadin, Director of Engineering at Hobsons will discuss how his company is leveraging a solution from Virtual Iron.

The full description is available on the registration page.

We've been adding more support features lately (see Updated Getting Started Guides and Admin Guide Now Online) and now we've added a much-requested feature to our website: an easier-to-use, searchable KnowledgeBase.

Our support team will keep adding to the KnowledgeBase. If there's a particular question you have that isn't answered in the KB, post it to the forums.

Our recent webcast with Hobson's EMT is now available for "on demand" viewing in our webcast archives.

The webcast went really well. If you weren't able to attend, I recommend taking a few minutes to watch it.

Last week's most popular Virtual Iron forum posts were:

Installing Single Server Edition Without Physical Access?

Need Alternate Way to Use the iSCSI SAN without Third NIC

4.1 Differences

In Windows XP/2003, you can automatically install VS Tools in a few simple steps:

1. Open up a command prompt (Start > Run > type cmd)

2. Drag-and-drop the VSTools-4.x.x.x-xx.msi icon into the command prompt window to automatically enter the VSTools-4.x.x.x-xx.msi path (or manually enter this information).

3. Type " /qn" after the VSTools-4.x.x.x-xx.msi path (that is a blank space followed by /qn) and press enter.

4. Go to your Virtualization Manager and perform a Hard Reset on the virtual server. Open the VS Configuration window and check the "VS Tools Installed" box. Click OK.

That's it -- VS Tools is now installed!

BusinessWeek recently posted an article on virtualization: Multiply & Conquer
Software that helps one server do the work of many. The article leads with a Virtual Iron customer story:

When ISB community bank recently moved its main branch into a new building, the time seemed right for a technology upgrade, too. The 87-employee Ixonia (Wis.) bank wanted to replace the three servers it used to host e-mail, database, and mobile messaging software. But with servers running about $6,000 apiece, it was reluctant to do so.

Instead, the bank spent about $1,000 for a program from Virtual Iron Software that essentially turned a single machine into several mini-servers, allowing it to consolidate the three tasks. And, says Gregg Hughes, information technology specialist for the $3.5 million bank, it can add more software in the future without buying additional hardware. "It will give us a lot more flexibility to expand," says Hughes. "Lots more options."

Read the full article here.