Skip to main content

Gartner: VMware's security is immature

First, I want to highlight some tidbits in the keynote that Gartner's John Enck gave at the opening of the IBTA Tech Forum. Initially he challenged the assumption that VMware is a secure platform that is immune to attacks and viruses. He mentioned that security is still a point of immaturity in VMware and that VMware issued a fix for known vulnerabilities in its product just a week prior to VMworld. While I believe that VMware is more secure than Windows was in its early days, more vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered as it is more widely deployed.

Another interesting tidbit that Enck shared had to do with some of the new management functions that server virtualization makes possible. Enck specifically mentioned that because the images of each individual VMware virtual machine (VM) is stored in what is called a VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) file, it opens the door for companies to assign metadata to these files including service oriented metadata. In so doing, companies can begin to manage and assign service priorities to VMDK files in the same way they manage other files. It is not yet clear how this will evolve over time but it makes sense that priority levels will become part of the VMDK file's metadata. In this way, VMs will be automatically assigned to the appropriate tier of server and storage hardware simply by looking at the setting at the metadata.


Source
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op
Post a Comment
Read more