VMware pros, who are under pressure to complete their VCP 5 exam before Feb. 29 to avoid additional requirements, yearn for Microsoft-style exams.

Highly virtualized IT shops wonder whether cloud management software can help them get to the next level of automation and efficiency.

When it comes to virtualization hardware, converged infrastructure like NetApp FlexPod and VCE Vblock is taking the place of yesterday?s vertically scaled systems.


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VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 gives customers advanced features, but the price tag has some customers eyeing less expensive options from VKernel and Microsoft.

Microsoft may gain some ground against VMware this year. The company simplified System Center 2012 licensing and continues to support unlimited virtualization management per host.

RHEV 3.1 will include storage live migration and other KVM virtualization management features that will give server virtualization users a viable alternative to Microsoft and VMware.

Many VMware vSphere features rely on vCenter Server, prompting some experts to speculate on ways its availability could be improved. Some say federation is also on the way.

The latest version of Microsoft?s management tool has VMware?s offerings in its sights, but it will need Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0 to complete the private cloud picture.

Security software giant McAfee is one of a growing number of enterprises running VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer together. Here?s how it manages multiple hypervisors.

Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x installation and is the follow up of version 4.1.6. which was released in November this year.

This version fixes a couple of issues which are described in the changelog.

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VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and Chargeback functionality for VMware and Hyper-V environments.

This version lacks the support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which the company announced in August and promised to deliver in Q4 this year.

vOperations Suite 4.5 adds the following new features:

· Added Automation features

o Auto deletion of abandoned VM images

o Auto-merging of unused snapshots

o Automated remediation for performance issues

o Auto-calculation of future resource requirements

o Automatic generations of alerts of abnormal metrics and trends

· Automation processes can now be more specifically controlled

· Support for VMware vSphere 5 storage DRS and storage clusters, new HA methods and inclusion of data from the VASA storage interface

· Reporting enhancements, like new reports, customize data tables, reporting widgets, dashboards

· Virtualization Cost Index now calculates the base cost for operating a VM

Labels: Release, VKernel

Let's look at the innocent C statement: a = b + c;What could possible go wrong? Let us list the ways:

1. a, b, or c are the not the variables we want
2. We specified addition, but we wanted something else
3. The addition operation overflows
4. a and b are unsigned, while c is signed and negative; the result becomes unsigned
5. a has a smaller size than b or c; the assignment operation overflows
6. a is signed while b or c are unsigned; a becomes negative while b+c are positive
7. a is unsigned, while b and c are signed; again we have an overflow
8. We used the wrong indentation level and people are unhappy about it

We can't expect the language to prevent all of these errors, but can we make C safer by trapping some of them at least during runtime? Turns out we can't do that without sacrificing performance:

• to handle (3), we need trapping signed addition and trapping unsigned addition instructions
• to handle (4), we need a mixed signedness trapping add
• to handle (5), we need a trapping store unsigned and trapping store signed instructions, which check that the value in the register fits into the memory location specified
• ditto with (6) and (7)

these (and similar) issues show up regularly in security vulnerabilities; it's hard to fix them because the necessary processor instructions are not there. We could emulate them by using sequences of existing instructions, but that would bloat the code and hurt performance; since performance is something that can be benchmarked but security is not, we end up with exploitable code.
So why are those instructions missing? In the 70's and 80's when the industry was ramping up performance was a much greater concern than security. Code was smaller and easier to audit; CPU cycles were longer and therefore more important to conserve; networks were small and private; truly malicious attacks were rare.
An unvirtuous cycle followed: C tried to make the most of exising processors, so its semantics mimic the instruction set of those days. It then became wildly successful, so processors were optimized for running C code; naturally they implemented or optimized instructions which directly translated to C concepts. This made C even more popular.
A pair of examples from the x86 world are the INTO and BOUND instructions. INTO (INTerrupt on Overflow) can follow an addition or subtraction instruction, effectively turning it into a trapping signed instruction. BOUND performs an array subscript bounds checking, trapping if the index is out of bounds. But the first implementations were rarely used, so they were not optimized in later iterations of the processor. Finally, the 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set removed those two instructions for good.