• Devices/OS: Companies such as VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft, and Sun are providing hypervisor, virtual machine, and virtual device solutions where several virtual “devices,” “servers,” or “desktops” can mimic separate physical devices.
• Networks: Virtualized networks enable dynamic collaboration by slicing bandwidth into virtual, isolated channels that can be assigned to a particular set of devices, real or virtual. Setting up new connections and collaborative environments becomes extremely easy.
• Applications: Virtual applications can either be streamed down to execute on local desktops (Microsoft App-V or Altiris SVS) or executed remotely from server farms such as Citrix XenApp. This allows applications to be portable and accessible from anywhere while reducing inter-application conflicts.

The Results:

Which hypervisor(s) are you currently using?

• 72% VMware
• 17% Using something else
• 9% Hyper-V and VMware
• 2% Hyper-V

(based on 46 responses)

So the VMware responses were in line with what we thought, although I’ve seen numbers up to 90% share of the market. And about 10% are at least playing with Hyper-V – pretty good numbers just a few months out from launch. But look at 17% using a hypervisor other than Hyper-V and VMware!

We know from talking with people that several brought up Xen. I have to tell you that other than from media and analysts, we never hear about Xen (Citrix), which is why we didn’t include it in the survey as a specific selection. Perhaps it took the introduction of Hyper-V, with the attendant marketing juggernaut, to break people of the VMware-only habit. Xen couldn’t really carry that “heterogeneous” hypervisor environment message on its own, but now that Hyper-V is available, the genie’s out of the bottle. Bears watching.

On another note: We were more successful in hanging onto our marbles on day two – people seemed more in tune to the poll and less focused on collecting giveaways than on day one! [Note: no attendees were irrevocably harmed during the execution of the polls. :)] At Interop Vegas, May 17 – 19, 2009, we’ll be about a year out from Microsoft launching Hyper-V and will make sure to ask the same question then to track changes in hypervisor adoption.

He says: “The main new techniques enabled by virtualization are far greater IT control over delivering applications and desktops to users, a less chance of human error by inexperienced end-users.”

Check out the overview here.

We've probably all heard that you can't secure what you can't see and that statement is even more profound when it comes to virtual environments.  This is because it is extremely challenging to see what is going on at a micro vs. macro level within a virtual environments network.  The virtualization vendors such as VMWare and Citrix have provided embedded tools into their management consoles that show a macro level of visibility but its not enough to identify security events in the environment.  Take a look at the attached picture.  It simply shows VMWare's ability to monitor virtual network performance statistics from a bits per second perspective.

<-Click To Enlarge

With only this level of detail how can one determine which network applications are causing spikes.  Is it FTP traffic that is occuring at a high volume at an unuseal time of day?  If that were occuring, could that be indicative of either a breach or some sort of problem? What if FTP isn't even an authorized service in the virtual environment but there is a high volume of it?  Did someone install a rouge FTP service so they could steal information from the server at will?

These types of questions can't really be answered without a micro level of detail into the packets flowing in, out and within the virtual environment.  Now, what I am highlighting is not security in the traditional sense of prevention but using visibility as a means to first identify, then pin point the source of an issue so that it can properly be mitigated.  Having constant visibility can also ensure that other security products in the environment are performing as expected.  What if a Montego HyperSwitch with firewalling enabled is configured with many policies but someone forgot to create an FTP block policy.  One could think they are protected from rouge FTP services transmiting data out of the network, but without constant visibility monitoring, can you be certain?

Some vendors, namely Reflex Security will get you to believe that their IPS / IDS solution that is inline and running in the virtual environment is the right and only approach.  Or they will tell you to hang a virtual IDS off a span port in the virtual environment and you will at least have visibility into the attacks that are taking place.  Well, sure... You now have attack visibility but at the performance cost of your virtual environment.  Signature matching technologies are great, I'm a huge believer; however they don't scale very well in shared computing environments such as virtual ones.  IDS systems also don't typically track protocol and network service (FTP, HTTP, etc.) utilizations; which is another important part of visibility.

So, what do we do to gain visibility without the performance headache?  Well, for starters its probably best to put your IDS/IPS solutions in the physical environment where performance will be less of a concern.  In fact, you can span a virtual switch's traffic out to a physical NIC as easy as you can to a virtual one.  So why do it virtual and have to pay a 60% CPU utilization tax?  Another solution is to IDS inspect only the things you care about.  Why IDS inspect SSL traffic if you know your solution can't unencrypt SSL.  Its just a waste of compute cycles isnt it?  Policy based switching helps you with directing only the things you care about to an IDS (attack visualization product).  Montego's HyperSwitch also can help you with the traffic redirection of only the things you care about.

Another method of visibility which I tend to be a fan of is one of packet analysis (aka NetFlow).  NetFlow was invented by Cisco some time ago and has gained popularity in the physical world and definately has a use in the virtual world.  NetFlow is lightweight.  Let me say that again, its light weight!  It only sends a summation of packet detail to an analytical engine which can do some number crunching, packet comparison, etc. etc. to make some sense out of whats going on.  Lancope, an Atlanta based visibility company that provides Network Visibility, Security Visibility and User Visibility has this tool on their website that is a Netflow Bandwidth calculator.  You'll see from playing with this ( http://www.lancope.com/netflowcalculator.aspx ) calculator that it doesn't consume a lot of network bandwidth to transmit these network accounting records.  It also doesn't cause a lot of CPU overhead to send these records to an analytical engine sitting somewhere in the network.

Lancope's analytical engines have the ability to do the following for you within your virtual environment:

...and probably a slew of other things I'm not aware of.  A screen shot of their product is bellow:

<- Click to enlarge

You'll notice from the screenshot that you are able to visualize who is talking to who, how much traffic they have sent and received and something called a concern index (not seen on this screenshot).

Now, a concern index is a number that increases as Lancopes analytical engines monitor suspicious activity on a session.  A high counter can be indicative of a security problem.  Its another way of identifying (visualizing) compromised hosts (virtual machines) without having to do signature matching like a heavy weight IPS engine.  Example:  Lets say you have a VM that has a BOT on it and is "owned".  The Lancope product is monitoring this long life session.  Let's say that session is established for several hours or maybe even days or months.  Lets also say that the conversation appears to be mostly unidirectional from a public ip address not belonging to your enterprise.  Lancope would increase a the concern index on this since this server hasn't typically had this type of behavior.  Once the concern index reached a certain level it could then fire off an email, send you a text message or something saying:  Warning, Warning, Danger, Danger Will Robinson!!! You're virtual server may be infected with a BOT, please investigate immediately!!!

This example is VISIBILITY which helps you with SECURITY.  There are a number of other things you can do with NetFlow and Lancope products that have less to do with security and more to do with operational efficiencies.  Things like, helping you answer questions of:  How do I know what network applications are taking up the most bandwidth?  When should I move those applications over to a server with more horsepower?  When did these VM's vmotion over here and was there a traffic condition / CPU condition that caused that to occur?  I could go on and on but thats a topic for another blog entry.

So, my suggestion is to take a look at what NetFlow has to offer.  Montego Networks supports NetFlow transmission and Lancope supports NetFlow analytics and with both you can regain what was lost visibility.

I hope this was helpful to you all!

-John Peterson

We've probably all heard that you can't secure what you can't see and that statement is even more profound when it comes to virtual environments.  This is because it is extremely challenging to see what is going on at a micro vs. macro level within a virtual environments network.  The virtualization vendors such as VMWare and Citrix have provided embedded tools into their management consoles that show a macro level of visibility but its not enough to identify security events in the environment.  Take a look at the attached picture.  It simply shows VMWare's ability to monitor virtual network performance statistics from a bits per second perspective.

<-Click To Enlarge

With only this level of detail how can one determine which network applications are causing spikes.  Is it FTP traffic that is occuring at a high volume at an unuseal time of day?  If that were occuring, could that be indicative of either a breach or some sort of problem? What if FTP isn't even an authorized service in the virtual environment but there is a high volume of it?  Did someone install a rouge FTP service so they could steal information from the server at will?

These types of questions can't really be answered without a micro level of detail into the packets flowing in, out and within the virtual environment.  Now, what I am highlighting is not security in the traditional sense of prevention but using visibility as a means to first identify, then pin point the source of an issue so that it can properly be mitigated.  Having constant visibility can also ensure that other security products in the environment are performing as expected.  What if a Montego HyperSwitch with firewalling enabled is configured with many policies but someone forgot to create an FTP block policy.  One could think they are protected from rouge FTP services transmiting data out of the network, but without constant visibility monitoring, can you be certain?

Some vendors, namely Reflex Security will get you to believe that their IPS / IDS solution that is inline and running in the virtual environment is the right and only approach.  Or they will tell you to hang a virtual IDS off a span port in the virtual environment and you will at least have visibility into the attacks that are taking place.  Well, sure... You now have attack visibility but at the performance cost of your virtual environment.  Signature matching technologies are great, I'm a huge believer; however they don't scale very well in shared computing environments such as virtual ones.  IDS systems also don't typically track protocol and network service (FTP, HTTP, etc.) utilizations; which is another important part of visibility.

So, what do we do to gain visibility without the performance headache?  Well, for starters its probably best to put your IDS/IPS solutions in the physical environment where performance will be less of a concern.  In fact, you can span a virtual switch's traffic out to a physical NIC as easy as you can to a virtual one.  So why do it virtual and have to pay a 60% CPU utilization tax?  Another solution is to IDS inspect only the things you care about.  Why IDS inspect SSL traffic if you know your solution can't unencrypt SSL.  Its just a waste of compute cycles isnt it?  Policy based switching helps you with directing only the things you care about to an IDS (attack visualization product).  Montego's HyperSwitch also can help you with the traffic redirection of only the things you care about.

Another method of visibility which I tend to be a fan of is one of packet analysis (aka NetFlow).  NetFlow was invented by Cisco some time ago and has gained popularity in the physical world and definately has a use in the virtual world.  NetFlow is lightweight.  Let me say that again, its light weight!  It only sends a summation of packet detail to an analytical engine which can do some number crunching, packet comparison, etc. etc. to make some sense out of whats going on.  Lancope, an Atlanta based visibility company that provides Network Visibility, Security Visibility and User Visibility has this tool on their website that is a Netflow Bandwidth calculator.  You'll see from playing with this ( http://www.lancope.com/netflowcalculator.aspx ) calculator that it doesn't consume a lot of network bandwidth to transmit these network accounting records.  It also doesn't cause a lot of CPU overhead to send these records to an analytical engine sitting somewhere in the network.

Lancope's analytical engines have the ability to do the following for you within your virtual environment:

...and probably a slew of other things I'm not aware of.  A screen shot of their product is bellow:

<- Click to enlarge

You'll notice from the screenshot that you are able to visualize who is talking to who, how much traffic they have sent and received and something called a concern index (not seen on this screenshot).

Now, a concern index is a number that increases as Lancopes analytical engines monitor suspicious activity on a session.  A high counter can be indicative of a security problem.  Its another way of identifying (visualizing) compromised hosts (virtual machines) without having to do signature matching like a heavy weight IPS engine.  Example:  Lets say you have a VM that has a BOT on it and is "owned".  The Lancope product is monitoring this long life session.  Let's say that session is established for several hours or maybe even days or months.  Lets also say that the conversation appears to be mostly unidirectional from a public ip address not belonging to your enterprise.  Lancope would increase a the concern index on this since this server hasn't typically had this type of behavior.  Once the concern index reached a certain level it could then fire off an email, send you a text message or something saying:  Warning, Warning, Danger, Danger Will Robinson!!! You're virtual server may be infected with a BOT, please investigate immediately!!!

This example is VISIBILITY which helps you with SECURITY.  There are a number of other things you can do with NetFlow and Lancope products that have less to do with security and more to do with operational efficiencies.  Things like, helping you answer questions of:  How do I know what network applications are taking up the most bandwidth?  When should I move those applications over to a server with more horsepower?  When did these VM's vmotion over here and was there a traffic condition / CPU condition that caused that to occur?  I could go on and on but thats a topic for another blog entry.

So, my suggestion is to take a look at what NetFlow has to offer.  Montego Networks supports NetFlow transmission and Lancope supports NetFlow analytics and with both you can regain what was lost visibility.

I hope this was helpful to you all!

-John Peterson

There’s speculation that falling VMware share prices, with no end in sight because of “poor revenue outlook” is the reason for the ouster.

Hmm. The stock went public at $29, went as high as $125 and is now at $40.26 (and falling as I write), almost a 40% premium over the first offering. Say what you will about the recently launched Microsoft Hyper-V and the Citrix offering that we never hear about, but VMware is the dominant virtualization player (and likely to remain so for at least some time given Microsoft’s track record with new product releases) in an exploding market. Gartner predictions are that the installed base of VMs will grow more than 10x between 2007 and 2011 and that by 2012 the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in a VM.

The future still looks pretty rosy for VMware – perhaps they’ll be taking a smaller chunk of the pie, but the pie’s getting much bigger. And all indications pointed to VMware moving up the stack and providing more management solutions (and more revenue streams) for the x86 virtualization market they helped to build.

So why the change? And why now? Is it a coincidence that it’s an ex-Microsoft exec taking over just as Hyper-V ships? Can only someone who knows the Microsoft Way combat the Microsoft Way? Remember this is the guy who wrote that Microsoft should “cut off Netscape’s air supply”.

So, good idea to say that Microsoft execs are better than VMware execs just as the Hyper-V juggernaut gets rolling? If I didn’t know better, I’d say this is the latest example of a MS FUD campaign…

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