Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Windows Virtualization

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 beta 2

porourke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:20:00 GMT

Hello, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft.

Recently, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 became available for public download. Part of this release is the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management; an integrated solution to give you all the benefits of virtualization for application lifecycle management. Congratulations to the Visual Studio Lab Management team for reaching this milestone!

Beta 2 Improvements:

§ Simplified Virtual Environment creation

§ Lab Environment Viewer with full-screen capability

§ Manual and automated testing in virtual environment

§ Build-deploy-test workflow for virtual environments

§ Enhanced workflow process parameters UI and report

§ Network isolation with support for domain controller VMs

§ Setup & Config – verification and auto provisioning of accounts

§ Virtual Machine templates

§ “In-Use” support for shared environments

The main features of Lab Management are:

Easily manage more complex test configurations

Lab environment as a first class entity for managing multi-machine test environments
Setup multiple configurations for testing quickly
Consistent, reliable access to test environments
Create multiple copies of test environments for parallel testing

New “clean” environment in minutes

Environment snapshot: lightweight and efficient
Facilitates exploratory testing

Scheduled build/test cycle on steroids

Snapshot to clean environment
Build triggered app deployment
Testing in more realistic environment

Rich bugs with environment snapshot

reduce the number of no-repro bugs

Visual Studio Download Page – you can download all the required components from there. This video can guide you through the download and installation process of TFS. And check out the Lab Management blog.

Thank you,

Bryon Surace

Upcoming Webcasts on Best Practices for Virtualizing MS Server Applications

porourke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:25:00 GMT

We’ve got some great webcasts coming up in the next few weeks to discuss recommendations for virtualizing MS server applications and the benefits of choosing hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution. Each technical webcast will focus on a specific server application- Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Please see below for detailed information.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SQL Server (Level 300). Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing SQL Server using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing SQL server for Production and Test/Dev scenarios focusing on consolidation, scale, load balancing, dynamic provisioning and high availability. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server (Level 300) Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time

Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing Exchange using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing Exchange for various Production scenarios. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.

Announcing the availability of the updated Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization and System Center

vtango — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Microsoft has a comprehensive portfolio of technologies when it comes to Virtualization ranging from Presentation Virtualization with Remote Desktop Services to Server Virtualization using Hyper-V with many more in between as below.

· Server Hardware Virtualization. Also known as a hypervisor, Server Hardware Virtualization runs a very lightweight core operating system. The hypervisor can host independent virtual machines (VMs). This form of virtualization requires hardware that has embedded virtualization awareness capabilities. Since the hypervisor is very lightweight, there is little overhead in the system, which allows for more scalability in the virtual machines.

· Server Software Virtualization. An operating system, such as Windows Server® 2003 or Windows Server 2008, runs an application that is able to host virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs a completely separate operating system and application set.

· Presentation Virtualization. Centralized systems host multiple user sessions, and all processing is done on those host systems. The user sessions are isolated from each other. Only the presentation information, such as keyboard and mouse inputs, and video updates are sent between the client and the host system. The client can be a full Windows-based workstation or a Windows-based terminal device.

· Application Virtualization. An application is isolated from the underlying operating system by means of wrapper software that encapsulates it. This allows multiple applications that may have conflicting dynamic link libraries (DLLs) or other incompatibilities to run on the same machine without affecting each other.

· Desktop Virtualization. This is similar to Server Software Virtualization, but it runs on client systems such as Windows Vista®. The client operating system runs a virtualization application that hosts virtual machines. This is often used when a specific person needs to run one or a limited number of legacy applications on a legacy operating system.

With the richness and breadth of these technologies, customers should evaluate their needs against the capabilities and solutions that each of the technologies is targeted at. The Solution Accelerators team has been working furiously to create guides for customers and we are really excited to announce the availability of the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Virtualization updated for Windows Server 2008 R2, which can help customers start their planning and deployment process for Virtualization using the Microsoft portfolio. With detailed documentation and simple flowcharts customers now have a powerful tool in their hands as they plan their deployments. Once the decision to go with a particular technology has been made, detailed guides are available for each of the technologies as well giving business decision makers, infrastructure stakeholders, and the organization as a whole a comprehensive tool for designing their virtual deployments.

As Tom Bittman from Gartner had said “Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place”. Our System Center suite of products provide a full suite of management solutions for this environment and the Infrastructure and Planning Guides for System Center have been updated for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Hyper-V, your journey starts here!

vtango — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:59:00 GMT

I have been inundated by people here at VMworld 2009 with tons of questions on Hyper-V and who want to see demos of Hyper-V. This blog post attempts to put together a list material for folks. Given the large amount of material this list is only a snapshot but one which will provide you enough to get started.

First off there is a huge amount of technical articles, documentation, whitepapers, case studies, API documentation that’s available. Your start point should be the Virtualization page here. That site provides links to numerous case studies about customers who are using Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization solutions. Next I suggest looking at the solutions site that provides information on the customer focused scenarios. Following this I encourage you to delve into the products that are used to build these solutions.

For the geeks like me who are really looking to understand how to get started and the technical details you should start your journey at the Virtualization TechCenter. For those of you who wanted to just get to the nuts and bolts go straight to the Hyper-V Getting Started Guide. For folks wanting to understand the architecture in some depth you want to start here. Developers can jump straight to the WMI API’s.

Finally for folks who want to see a collection of videos with great demos of the products I’d like to point to Tony Sopers blog which contains a huge collection of these.

Enjoy.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Microsoft Virtualization: Best Choice for MS Server Applications

porourke — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:21:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Zane Adam, general manager of Virtualization and Systems Management. As more and more customers are looking at virtualization to help reduce cost and decrease complexity in their infrastructure, we are seeing lots of questions around virtualizing MS server applications such as Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. What benefits should I expect to see? What do I need to consider when virtualizing these mission critical business application? Should I virtualize all roles within a server application?

We have worked across MS application groups to test our products with hyper-v and we believe that MS virtualization is the best choice for MS server applications. First, MS server applications are built for Windows Server, and because hyper-v is part of the operating system, there is no need to add complexity of support and interoperability by adding a 3rd party virtualization layer. This means there is just one stop for all of your support needs and also assurance that the stack of applications and hypervisor works well together. Second, to help ensure optimal performance Microsoft has specific deployment guidance for virtualizing MS server applications which results in a mixed physical and virtual environment. System Center is the management solution that allows you to view both physical and virtual instances from one console. Third, as you know MS virtualization is up to six times less expensive than other virtualization solutions in the market, which makes running your server applications even that more affordable.

The folks who developed the MS server applications have developed specific guidance on virtualizing individual applications based on deployment scenarios. You can hear more thoughts from them on the following blogs:

Exchange Server: http://msexchangeteam.com/

SQL Server: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/default.aspx

SharePoint: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

Also, for more information please visit www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solutions/business-critical-applications .

Thanks-

Zane

The Virtualization platform vs. the Operating System

vtango — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:01:00 GMT

Day 1 at VMworld was mostly about Labs and content which builds up to the main event starting with the keynote on Tuesday morning. Looking forward to today.

In the meanwhile I have been hearing about a concept being put forth that the virtualization platform is it and the OS is but relegated to the consigns of history. That’s an interesting argument, one that in my opinion is built around the myth that somehow the interface exposed by the virtualization platform is what applications are written to. The fact of the matter is that the “Virtual Machine” as exposed by the virtualization platform mimics the underlying hardware with all its diversity. An entity is still required to manage the hardware resources and provide the software abstractions to interact with incredibly diverse hardware. That is the operating system and that’s what applications are developed for.

Back in time such as of the Manchester Mark 1 application programs were self-contained which were loaded into the memory of the machine and then executed from there. Overtime developers realized the value of re-use and rather than build in everything into the application program, re-use and common abstractions became prevalent. As the diversity of hardware and peripherals increased in complexity, the operating system is what provided the abstractions which provided a common mechanism for all applications to interact with and utilize the machine effectively. That is what gave rise to the operating system. What befuddles me is the argument that somehow the emergence of the virtualization platform minimizes the tasks as performed by the operating system. There are some who will argue that the emergence of application frameworks such as .net and Java take on this role, but in the end below them they still require the abstractions offered by an OSJ. What do people think?

An interesting debate but mostly put out to confuse our customers who are fundamentally interested in running an efficient IT infrastructure that provides them the flexibility and ability to meet the business goals and be a strategic asset to their organizations. Customers are running a multitude of applications such as SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, CRM, home grown line of business applications etc. Our partners and us are committed and focused to make sure that it happens.

By the way talking of partners, it was great to our partner Leostream announce their connection broker for Windows Server 2008 R2 and System Center Virtual machine Manager 2008 R2. In talking to our partner here at VMworld, it’s been wonderful to see the incredible innovation on their part based on the Microsoft platform. Thanks, this is what the Microsoft platform the best for our customers with its breadth and partner solutions.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

Follow us on Twitter and get a chance to win a Zune HD

vtango — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:09:00 GMT

I now have the final list of sessions that I will be attending at VMworld. As I noted last time I had a lot of waitlists which it now appears I have not made the cut for most of the sessions. That means I will be at our booth (#2422) almost all of today (Aug 31, 2009) and at the times when I am not attending a session.

There is a great opportunity to win a 32GB Zune HD. All you have to do is to follow the Microsoft Virtualization experts on Twitter. By the way this is open to folks who are not attending VMworld as well. So follow along with us!! You can follow me here.

I am heading over to the Moscone Center to register and see if I can get into some of the labs being offered today.

Vijay Tewari

Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Virtualization

VMworld 2009 an oppurtunity to meet our customers

vtango — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:09:00 GMT

Hi, I am Vijay Tewari a program manager with the Virtualization team here at Microsoft. Having spent the last 15 months or so deeply involved in the development of Hyper-V I am really looking forward to meeting customers and partners at VMworld 2009.

Much is being made about the fact that we are not showing Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager at this event due to the show policies. I will stay away from that debate although coming on the heels of our RTM I would have loved to show the product. However, a lot of us will be there at the event and are really looking forward to interacting with customers. At the end of the day the product is only useful if it meets our customers’ demands and there is nothing like having a face to face interaction with our customers to hear firsthand what they like and hate about the product.

Below is my tentative schedule for VMworld. As you can see a lot of wait lists, but I am hoping that I can squeeze in. Would like your feedback if there are sessions you would like to see covered.

We will be tweeting (follow vtango on Twitter) and blogging all through the event, so follow along.

Looking forward to seeing you!!

Vijay

Vijay Tewari, Principal Program Manager, Virtualization

Personal Schedule for Vijay Tewari

Monday


7:30 AM-9:30 AM (Waiting List)	LAB01	VMware vSphere™ 4 - New Features, Best of, Advanced Topics

10:00 AM-11:00 AM (Waiting List)	V13100	The VMware Competitive Advantage - A Comparison of Server Virtualization Offerings

11:30 AM-12:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13229	Introduction to VMware vSphere

1:30 PM-2:30 PM (Waiting List)	V11721	Best Practices for Successful VI Design

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	V13478	Executing Enterprise Virtualization - Continuing Case Study with USMC

4:00 PM-5:00 PM	V12226	Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution with VMware

Tuesday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM	SS5160	Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure

11:30 AM-12:30 PM	VM3142	Large Scale Virtualization

1:00 PM-2:00 PM	VM3235	Introducing VMware vCenter Product Family: Managing Service Levels Across Dynamic IT Infrastructure

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1960	Datacenter Consolidation and Migration with VMware Site Recovery Manager

4:30 PM-5:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC2761	ESX Networking for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

5:30 PM-7:00 PM	TA2544	A Comprehensive Look at the Security and Compliance of vSphere 4

Wednesday


9:00 AM-10:00 AM (Waiting List)	BOF105	Technology and Architecture -- Virtual Networking

10:00 AM-11:00 AM	TA3220	VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0

11:00 AM-12:00 PM (Waiting List)	BOF104	Cloud Computing

12:00 PM-1:30 PM (Waiting List)	VM1700	vApps and advanced VM templates in vSphere 4

2:00 PM-3:30 PM	TA3880	Head-To-Head Comparison: VMware vSphere and ESX vs. Hyper-V and XenServer

4:30 PM-6:00 PM	BC3301	DR Architecture Design Workshop with SRM

Thursday


9:30 AM-10:30 AM (Waiting List)	BC2961	VMware Fault Tolerance Architecture and Performance

11:00 AM-12:00 PM	BC3387	Advanced Data Protection for Microsoft SQL and Exchange Server in a VMware Environment

12:30 PM-2:30 PM	LAB07	VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4

2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Waiting List)	BC3421	SRM Architecture & Features: The Road Ahead

4:00 PM-5:30 PM	TA2525	VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive

Partner Resources: Windows Error Reporting & More

WSV_GUY — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:20:00 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

In my last blog, I discussed the importance of a Security Development Lifecycle and how we're making resources available to our customers and partners. Today, I want to discuss a more resources Microsoft provides our partners to develop and refine their products running on Windows and point out opportunities for integration with Hyper-V. There are a number of ways we work with partners to improve code quality and security starting with Windows Error Reporting.

Windows Error Reporting (WER)

Windows Error Reporting is a set of Windows technologies that capture software crash data and support end-user reporting of crash information. Through Windows Quality Online Services (Winqual), software and hardware vendors can access reports in order to analyze and respond to these problems. WER technologies are implemented in Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003/2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008/2008 R2.

Vendors can use WER to view error reports at no charge. This service is available for all products, even those that do not qualify for the "Designed for Windows" logo-although we strongly recommend that you submit your products to the Windows Logo Program.

With data from Microsoft Windows Error Reporting (WER), you can identify the most common real-world customer problems and quickly provide a solution to your customers. While customer support calls provide information about common issues, they do not always provide enough detail to debug the actual code. Further, support records indicate only those problems which prompted calls. Because it is much easier for users to submit an error report than to contact customer support, WER can provide a more comprehensive picture of the problems your customers are having. And because WER collects data at the point of failure, you can get a more detailed picture of what is going wrong.

In the end, this is a win-win situation. PARTNERS WIN because they can diagnose and produce better code (and lower support costs) and CUSTOMERS WIN with higher quality solutions. If your company develops software and aren't using WER, you need to take advantage of this resource. Here's the link to the WER site:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/maintain/StartWER.mspx

While WER can be a boon to developers by providing critical information to triage issues, we didn't stop there. We also released a new tool, called the !exploitable Crash Analyzer, on CodePlex March 20 at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. A Windows debugger extension, this heuristics-based tool is aimed at not only helping developers assess what is causing crashes, but also ranking the seriousness of a bug.

Introducing !exploitable Crash Analyzer: What does it do?

The program works by examining crash data-information gathered when an application stops performing its expected function-to identify the unique issues that caused the crash. From there, the program provides guidance on how exploitable the crash is, and can be used by third-party developers to then prioritize the problem.

"As a tool, it can save developers time and effort," said Roger Kay, president of tech industry analyst group Endpoint Technologies Associates. "A number of apparently different crashes can actually be caused by the same code. The analyzer isolates the offending block and essentially says, 'Here, all these different crashes are actually the same failure, and it's an important one that you ought to fix right away because it presents an open attack surface.'"

If you're interested in this tool, go to the Microsoft Security Engineering Center where you can download the tool from CodePlex (CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site) and find how this can help in your development.

The link is here: http://www.microsoft.com/security/msec/default.mspx

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Principal Group Program Manager

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Hypervisor Footprint Debate Part 3: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V & VMware ESXi 3.5

WSV_GUY — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:01:00 GMT

In my last two blog posts (Part 1 & Part 2), I started an in depth analysis tackling VMware's claims head on that because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi are single purpose hypervisors, they are therefore more secure. If that's the case, then it stands to reason that ESX/ESXi:

should have fewer patches (they have less code to patch)
patches should be smaller in disk footprint (they have a smaller codebase and you want to keep code churn to a minimum; otherwise one could ship a 1k stub file and claim to be smaller)
should offer higher availability, reliability and uptime

Using VMware's own metrics:

In part 3, lets take a look at VMware's favorite comparison Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to ESXi 3.5. Let's have a look.

Stacking The Deck In VMware's Favor

In this last comparison, I will freely admit that this isn't an apples to apples comparison. In this comparison, I gave ESXi 3.5 a 6 month advantage. Here's what I mean. Specifically, I compare:

VMware ESXi 3.5 from June 30th 2008 to June 30th 2009 (a 12 month period)
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V January 1 2008 to June 30th 2009 (an 18 month period)

Using an 18 month sample set for Windows Server 2008 covers the majority of its time in market and goes to the heart VMware's fundamental claim that because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi are single purpose hypervisors, they are therefore more secure. This tilts the scale in VMware's favor.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to VMware ESXi 3.5

Disk Footprint & Patch Count. Here's what we found:

Windows Server 2008 Full Installation: 32 patches totaling 408 MB of patches
Windows Server 2008 Core Installation: 26 patches totaling 82 MB of patches or (~20% fewer than a Windows Server 2008 full installation)
VMware ESXi 3.5: 13 patches, totaling over 2.7 GB.

Yes, I said over 2.7 GB. To put it another way,

VMware ESXi 3.5 had a 6.6x greater patch footprint than Windows Server 2008 (Full)
VMware ESXi 3.5 had a 33x greater patch footprint than Windows Server 2008 (Core)

So much for the disk footprint argument. Again, how can the ESXi footprint be so huge?

Because VMware releases a whole new ESXi image every time they release a patch. Furthermore, because VMware releases a whole new ESXi image every time they release a patch it also means that every ESXi 3.5 server requires a reboot. At this point, a VMware salesman may actually concede that every ESXi server has to be rebooted for every patch, but they will then state that they have VMotion (Live Migration) so it doesn't affect their uptime.

Except when their own patches cause days of downtime and render VMotion impotent.

Reliability/Availability. With VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2, it included a serious flaw which resulted in two days of downtime for their customers including the loss of VMotion:

"Starting this morning, we could not power on nor VMotion any of our virtual machines," said someone identified as "mattjk" on a VMware support forum. "The VI Client threw the error 'A general system error occurred: Internal Error.'"

It was so bad, VMware's CEO had to apologize on numerous occasions. (HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, & HERE). VMware then rushed out the VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 3 which introduced instability to VMware High Availability and could cause virtual machines to spontaneously reboot. (HERE & HERE)

Virtual machines that spontaneously reboot due to bugs in VMware high availability.

Now consider the fact that there were two significant quality and reliability issues with two major updates in a row (ESX/ESXi Update 2 & Update 3). While the initial Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V release didn't provide Live Migration (Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R1 had Quick Migration and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 includes Live Migration for free), it didn't include two days of potential downtime and virtual machines unexpectedly rebooting either. For those that track availability in terms of nines (five nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime a year) VMware Update 3.5 Update 2 dropped customers to "two nines" of availability.

Using VMware's own metrics, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is clearly the winner over ESXi 3.5.

The Facts Contradict VMware's Claims

As stated at the beginning of this series, VMware's overarching point is because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi is a single purpose hypervisor, they are therefore more secure. While VMware heavily touts this claim (it's in numerous location on their website for starters), the facts from this analysis directly contradict their claims. Specifically:

The platform with the largest number of patches was VMware ESX 3.5 with 85 Security & Critical Patches averaging over a patch per week.
The platform with the largest patch footprint was VMware ESX 3.5 totaling over 3 GB worth of patches followed by VMware ESXi 3.5 with over 2.7 GB. That's right, VMware's single purpose virtualization platforms that claims to have the smallest footprint had the two largest patch footprints by about a mile. (Graph below)
Both VMware ESX & ESXi had a recent case of the most severe virtualization flaw with guest code able to break out of the virtual machine and could potentially:
- Provides administrator access, Allows complete confidentiality, integrity, and availability violation; Allows unauthorized disclosure of information; Allows disruption of service.
VMotion/Live Migration is not a panacea to patching. It can help, but in the case of VMware's own self-inflicted faulty patch, it rendered their advantage impotent.
VMware had not just one, but two significant updates with serious quality and reliability issues with both ESX and ESXi. Specifically, ESX/ESXi Update 2 Issues: HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, & HERE & ESX/ESXi Update 3 Issues: HERE & HERE.

The Point Of This Series

Say it with me:

> Security is more than just disk footprint. <

Quoting disk footprint size alone is a nice pithy, superficial phrase, but it's also a boat load of bollocks. The next time some VMware representative throws out that argument, point them to this blog and tell them Jeff sent you. If you've ever spent anytime with a security expert, one of the first things they will tell you is that security is not a one time exercise. Security is an ongoing process that should be embedded throughout the entire development lifecycle. It's that belief that drove us to develop the Microsoft Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) and is publicly available.

Microsoft Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL)

The concepts that make up the Microsoft SDL were formed with the Trustworthy Computing (TwC) directive of January 2002. At that time, many software development groups at Microsoft instigated "security pushes" to find ways to improve the security of existing code.

Becoming a mandatory policy in 2004, the SDL represents a major cultural evolution at Microsoft with regards to software security and privacy and has matured into a well defined methodology. A "security process by a software company," the SDL was designed as an integral part of the development process. The development, implementation and constant improvement of the SDL represents a strategic investment for Microsoft, and an evolution in the way that software is designed, developed, and tested.

From a high level, the Microsoft SDL looks like this:

The Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle

Benefits of the Microsoft SDL:

Reducing the number of software vulnerabilities
The SDL has played a critical role in embedding security and privacy into Microsoft software and culture, leading to measurable and widely recognized security improvements in flagship products such as Windows and SQL Server and the proof is real. How about:
- Windows XP to Vista a 45% decrease
- SQL Server 2000 to 2005 91% decrease

Windows Server 2008 Full vs Server Core
- Reduction in patches by ~50%

Reducing the total cost of development
The SDL reduces the "total cost of development" by finding and eliminating vulnerabilities early. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), eliminating vulnerabilities in the design stage can cost 30 times less than fixing them post release.

Read that last sentence again.

Thirty times.

I also want to point out that the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle doesn't end once the bits are released. It also means having a well-established response mechanism including:

responding to potential security threats
root cause analysis to understand why the issue occurred and ensure that issue isn't repeated
issuing security patches

The importance of a security development lifecycle cannot be understated. No matter how well you execute, there is no such thing as perfect code. Whether it's Microsoft, VMware, <insert software vendor here>, having a rigorous security development practices in place is imperative. And, in case you think I'm satisfied with our patch numbers above, you'd be wrong. I don't ever want to get complacent and think for a moment that "security is done." Security is never done.

Let he who has written perfect code throw the first stone.

Let's Have A Look At The VMware's Security Development Lifecycle

So, where's the VMware Security Development Lifecycle?

You're guess is as good as mine.

I went to VMware's site and searched for their security development lifecycle. I found their Security Center which lists their patches, but that's just one small aspect to a security development lifecycle. I Bing searched "VMware security development lifecycle" and was returned a sales pitch from VMware to buy something at $1500 per processor.

No, I'm not kidding.

Making The SDL Available To Our Partners

After a significant investment in time, money, manpower we've developed and want to give back to our partners. A great place to start is the Microsoft SDL Homepage. Here you will find whitepapers, best practices, threat modeling tools, process guidance and much more. In addition, we recently released the Microsoft SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team Systems. This template helps ease the adoption of the SDL, demonstrates security return on investment and provides auditable security requirements and status.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out an excellent book aptly titled, Writing Secure Code Vol. 2 and point to the blog of one of the authors, Michael Howard. More links below.

Microsoft SDL Homepage: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc448177.aspx

Microsoft SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/dd670265.aspx

Writing Secure Code Volume 2: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Secure-Second-Michael-Howard/dp/0735617228

Michael Howard's Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/

In my next blog, we'll discuss more free tools and programs available our partners.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Principal Group Program Manager

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Hypervisor Footprint Debate Part 1 UPDATE: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 & VMware ESXi 3.5

WSV_GUY — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:56:00 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

In my last blog post, I started an in depth analysis tackling VMware’s claims head on that because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi are single purpose hypervisors, they are therefore more secure. I read some posts on the blogosphere that had questions about the methodology. Let’s dive in.

Didn’t Compare The Number Of Reboots

You’re right I didn’t. I didn’t think comparing the number of reboots was needed after:

establishing that VMware’s own patches caused customers two days of downtime without the use of VMotion to mitigate that downtime
referring to VMware’s own updates that caused VMs to spontaneously reboot due to bugs in VMware HA
pointing out that every ESXi patch requires a reboot

Even if every Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 patch came out on a different day (that wasn’t the case most of the patches came out in groups) and required a reboot at the time, there’s no way on earth that the cumulative time would be in the ball park of two days per server.

Service Pack 2

You’re right I didn’t include Service Pack 2. Service Pack 2 is an optional download. You can test this out very easily. Go to any server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 and run Windows Update.

Here’s what I included:

Both Microsoft and VMware also have optional patches, but I didn't include this type because they are optional, so we could focus on the most acute patches. Finally, let me very clear about the Microsoft patches. These counts include ALL critical and recommended patches, meaning if there was a critical patch for IE or some other Windows component I counted it. Had I ignored these types of patches, that wouldn’t be a fair comparison.

However, for the sake of comparison and transparency, I added Service Pack 2 to the count and here’s what we found:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008: 27 patches, totaling 845 MB.
VMware ESXi 3.5: 13 patches, totaling over 2.7 GB.

To put it another way,

VMware ESXi 3.5 still had a 4.3x greater patch footprint

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 RTM’d Later Than Windows Server 2008

That’s a great point and my mistake. I apologize for that error and have corrected it. (BTW: It doesn’t take me a month to apologize and make corrections, but I digress..)

Let me tell you how this happened.

In doing the patch comparison, I started with VMware’s favorite example, VMware ESXi 3.5 and Windows Server 2008 which RTM’d in Q4 2007. I wanted to take a reasonable, historical sample size of both platforms. Going back 18 months ensures the sample set covers the majority of Windows Server 2008 time in market and tackles VMware’s fundamental claim that because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi are single purpose hypervisors, they are therefore more secure. If anything this should work in VMware’s favor.

As I pored through data I realized I wanted to do the full matrix and include:

VMware ESXi
VMware ESX
Windows Server 2008 (Full)
Windows Server 2008 (Core)
and finally Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

This way, customers get the most comprehensive data and can make an informed decision. As you can see, MS Hyper-V Server 2008 was at the end of the analysis and this mistake crept because it slipped my mind that MS Hyper-V Server 2008 shipped after Windows Server 2008. (For example, MS Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are sim shipping this time around…)

The Notion Of Truth

This is an ideal time to make an important and fundamental point about competitive comparisons. The reason we’re able to perform this analysis and debate this topic openly is because the facts are freely available in the public domain without restriction. I’m happy to discuss the methodology used and make corrections as needed, but the point is we can have these discussions.

This point may sound obvious, reasonable and rational, but it’s not what VMware believes when it comes to competitive benchmarking. VMware has decided that they want to tightly control the concept of truth and only want the public to hear the VMware version of the truth. This is an unfortunate situation for customers who value open debate and basic fairness.

That’s another blog for another time.

Cheers, -Jeff

Hypervisor Footprint Debate Part 1: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 & VMware ESXi 3.5

WSV_GUY — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:13:00 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

After my recent blog discussing the release of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, we received overwhelmingly positive feedback. At the same time, there's still some skepticism about free Live Migration and almost daily we keep hearing, "This is too good to be true, is Live Migration really free? Is High Availability also free? What's the catch?" Yes, both Live Migration and HA are free. Check out this earlier blog for details.

At the same time, we've also received questions about Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and VMware ESX/ESXi in terms of disk footprint. The disk footprint argument is a favorite bit of FUD by VMware which appears to making the rounds again in the blogosphere. In the past couple of weeks, I've seen a few articles reprinting this pabulum almost verbatim. So today, I thought we'd analyze the whole disk footprint argument and, as usual, let's analyze the facts.

The Thin Hypervisor Debate In A Nutshell

Rather than attempt to restate VMware's argument, let's just use their exact verbiage. From VMware's website:

It's interesting to point out that VMware uses ESX & ESXi 3.5 in the column title, but then only uses ESXi for comparison in the right hand column and then rushes to compares ESXi to Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Gosh, I wonder why ESX 3.5 isn't included? We'll cover that too.

Pay special attention to the last paragraph:

"VMware ESXi is a fully functional hypervisor in a 32 MB disk footprint, which reduces the risk of down time and increases reliability."

There are three metrics to VMware's argument:

Disk footprint. Disk footprint. Disk footprint. They're quite fixated on that.
Reduce the risk of downtime due to fewer patches (i.e. fewer patches is good)
Increase reliability (and, in turn, availability)

VMware's overarching point is because their disk footprint is smaller and ESX/ESXi is a single purpose hypervisor, they are therefore more secure. If that's the case, then it stands to reason that ESX/ESXi:

should have fewer patches (they have less code to patch)
patches should be smaller in disk footprint (they have a smaller codebase and you want to keep code churn to a minimum; otherwise one could ship a 1k stub file and claim to be smaller)
should offer higher availability, reliability and uptime

We're going to put that to the test.

Before We Get Started

Before we delve into the analysis, I'd like to point out that VMware touts ESXi as a 32 MB hypervisor, yet the download is over 200 MB. So, are we too assume that the other 170+ MB doesn't count? I point this out because both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 do have larger disk footprints, but also provide incredible value and capabilities that our customers desire such as driver compatibility with a vast catalog of hardware, widely used management interfaces, scripting capability (PowerShell anyone?), MPIO, High Availability, etc.

If you really want to focus on the disk footprint that matters, the amount of software that could be directly exposed to VM attack, the Hyper-V hypervisor and virtualization stack combined is about 20 MB, ~19.4 MB for the virtualization stack and ~600k for the hypervisor.

In short, VMware has focused on our entire footprint which is made up mostly of stuff that isn't exposed to VM traffic at all or only exposed indirectly, while ignoring the part that matters most and for which VMware doesn't have a strong track record.

Time For Some Analysis

With VMware's own metrics in mind, I decided we should perform an apples to apples comparison. Specifically, over a 12 month period from June 30th 2008 to June 30th 2009, comparing: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 (R1) and VMware ESXi 3.5 in terms of numbers of patches, size of patches and availability. I specifically chose these versions because I wanted to take a reasonable, historical sample size (12 months) of both platforms. Both Hyper-V R2 and VSphere have RTM'd within the last 90 days and that wouldn't be statistically relevant.

What did we compare? Wanting to keep the comparisons as close as possible, here's what we analyzed:

VMware: Security and Critical Patches
Microsoft: Critical and Important Patches

Both Microsoft and VMware also have optional patches, but I didn't include this type because they are optional, so we could focus on the most acute patches.. Finally, let me very clear about the Microsoft patches. These counts include ALL critical and recommended patches, meaning if there was a critical patch for IE or some other Windows component I counted it. Had I ignored these types of patches, that wouldn’t be a fair comparison.

Comparison #1: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 & VMware ESXi 3.5

Disk Footprint & Patch Count. Here's what we found:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008: 26 patches, totaling 82 MB.
VMware ESXi 3.5: 13 patches, totaling over 2.7 GB.

Yes, I said over 2.7 GB. To put it another way,

VMware ESXi 3.5 had a 33x greater patch footprint

So much for the disk footprint argument. How can the ESXi patch footprint be so huge?

Because VMware releases a whole new ESXi image every time they release a patch. Furthermore, because VMware releases a whole new ESXi image every time they release a patch it also means that every ESXi patch requires a reboot. At this point, a VMware salesman, may concede the point that every ESXi server has to be rebooted for every patch, but they will then state that they have VMotion (Live Migration), so it doesn't affect their uptime.

Except when their own patches cause days of downtime and render VMotion impotent.

Reliability/Availability. With VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2, it included a serious flaw which resulted in two days of downtime for their customers including the loss of VMotion:

"Starting this morning, we could not power on nor VMotion any of our virtual machines," said someone identified as "mattjk" on a VMware support forum. "The VI Client threw the error 'A general system error occurred: Internal Error.'"

Virtual machines that unexpectedly reboot due to bugs in VMware high availability. Think about that for a minute.

The News Gets Worse

Not only did VMware ESXi have a 31x greater patch footprint, but they also had the most serious virtualization security flaws. Specifically,

Guest code able to break out of VM and into the ESX Hypervisor

For those you who may not know, code running in a guest operating system that is able to break out of a VM and into a hypervisor is THE WORST type of security flaw you can have for a virtualization platform. Period. VMware has had exploits on both their "thin hypervisor (ESXi)" and on their "thick hypervisor (ESX)" as recently as a few months ago.

For example, April 2009 CVE-2009-1244: A critical vulnerability in the virtual machine display function allows a guest operating system users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS.

Impact: Provides administrator access, Allows complete confidentiality, integrity, and availability violation; Allows unauthorized disclosure of information; Allows disruption of service.

Something to consider when VMware wants to host your data in "their cloud."

Now consider the fact that there were two significant quality and reliability issues with two major updates in a row (ESX/ESXi Update 2 & Update 3). While the initial Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 release didn't offer Live Migration (MS Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 now includes Live Migration/HA for free), it didn't include two days of potential downtime and virtual machines unexpectedly rebooting either. For those that track availability in terms of nines (five nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime a year) VMware Update ESXi 3.5 Update 2 dropped customers to "two nines" of availability.

Using VMware's own metrics, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is clearly the winner over ESXi 3.5.

One more interesting observation

After VMware released Update 2, which affected both ESXi & ESX, they rushed to get a fix out the door and did so in a few days. One interesting thing I noticed was that in the span of a few days, the patch grew 17 MB.

17 MB in a few days????

Now, I'm not sure what's in that 17 MB (potentially more than 50% of their hypervisor footprint could have been churned using VMware's 32 MB hypervisor claim, but I digress.), but if I had just released a patch that resulted in multiple days of downtime for my customers let me tell you what I would have done:

Created a highly scoped, well tested, surgical fix with minimal code churn.

To see a 17 MB change in just a few days would be cause for concern and an immediate code review.

Maybe that's just me.

In my next blog, we'll compare Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX 3.5.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Principal Group Program Manager

Windows Server, Hyper-V

CentOS, OpenSUSE & More Linux Distros on Hyper-V R2!

WSV_GUY — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:53:02 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

Just a couple of weeks ago, we surprised a few folks by contributing over 20,000 lines of source code to the Linux kernel under GPL V2. Here are some quotes from the announcement:

Our work in this area is all about providing more flexibility and choice, and requests from our customers and partners were really the impetus behind those efforts. We are hearing more and more customers and open source partners telling us they see some of their best value when they deploy new open source software solutions on top of existing Microsoft platforms. Today's release would have been unheard of from Microsoft a few years ago, but it's a prime example that customer demand is a powerful catalyst for change. -Sam Ramji, Sr. Director, Server & Tools, Microsoft

Customers have told us that they would like to standardize on one virtualization platform, and the Linux device drivers will help customers who are running Linux to consolidate their Linux and Windows servers on a single virtualization platform, thereby reducing the complexity of their infrastructure. Consequently, they'll have more choices in how to develop and deploy solutions, while still managing their entire data center from a single management console. -Tom Hanrahan, Director Open Source Technology Center, Microsoft

What Do Analysts Think?

Reviewers and analysts agree this a very big and positive step:

"This is a logical, but precedent-setting decision for Microsoft. Credit Microsoft for recognizing the reality that a sizable portion of its customer base was going to be running Linux and Microsoft side by side in virtualized environments, so it would be important to be competitive on an interoperability front," said Stephen O'Grady, analyst at Redmonk. "For all of its logic, however, this is a move that would have been inconceivable a few years ago, meaning that the glasnost of Microsoft vis a vis open source continues." Stephen O'Grady, InfoWorld
"This is a big deal. When you get in the mainline Linux kernel it is a competitive advantage for Microsoft." Chris Wolf, Network World

What Does Linus Think?

Linus Torvalds provided his own assessment on the Microsoft contribution:

I agree that it's driven by selfish reasons, but that's how all open source code gets written! We all "scratch our own itches". It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved. It's the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree.
So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source - the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the 'your' in question happens to be.
Does anybody complain when hardware companies write drivers for the hardware they produce? No. That would be crazy. Does anybody complain when IBM funds all the POWER development, and works on enterprise features because they sell into the enterprise? No. That would be insane.
So the people who complain about Microsoft writing drivers for their own virtualization model should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical. Linus Torvalds

Jason Perlow, Takes A Look At Hyper-V R2 & Few Linux Distros

Jason Perlow, a ZDnet columnist who has been writing about Open Source for over 10 years, was so intrigued by the new capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 that he spent the last week installing various Linux distros (CentOS, Scientific Linux, OpenSUSE) atop Hyper-V R2. The result is a detailed article on ZDnet documenting the step-by-step instructions for each distro!

This article makes for an excellent read. I highly recommend checking out Jason's article here at ZDnet.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Promotion of Brad Anderson to Corporate Vice President, Management and Services Division

larrygrothaus — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:16:00 GMT

It comes as no surprise to the regular readers of this blog, that a key tenant of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is that customers should be able to manage their physical and virtual IT resources from the same set of easy to use tools. It seems that customers agree, as demonstrated through the growth of the Microsoft Management and Services Division (30% growth year over year) offerings during some challenging economic times.

Today we’ve announced that Brad Anderson, one of the key drivers behind Microsoft’s management offerings, including the System Center suite and products such as VMM, has been promoted to corporate vice president. We wanted to share the news with those of you that have worked with or met him over the years through events such as the annual Microsoft Management Summit conference. Congratulations Brad!

R2 Veeam Too

porourke — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:36:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Doug Hazelman and I’m the director of the Global Systems Engineers Group at Veeam Software. I’ve been with Veeam for almost two years, and prior to that I was with Aelita Software (which was acquired by Quest Software) where I worked with the same management team now behind Veeam Software. I’d like to thank Microsoft for this opportunity to guest blog on Veeam’s direction around Hyper-V.

Veeam’s tagline is “listening to you, building the tools you need.” We’ve heard your requests and we’d like to announce now that Veeam is committed to fully supporting Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. While Veeam has continued to build some of the best software for data protection and management of VMware infrastructures, we realize that customers are now faced with more virtualization choices. By fully supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, Veeam can help you manage heterogeneous hypervisor deployments and clouds with the innovative solutions you’ve come to expect from Veeam. The management and R&D teams at Veeam have a long history of working with Microsoft going back to the Aelita days, and we’re all excited to be working with Microsoft again.

The Veeam engineers are currently focusing a lot of time and energy on how we can provide the best support for Hyper-V. Look for more information in the coming weeks as we disclose more about Veeam’s plans for Hyper-V. And congratulations to Microsoft for releasing R2.

Thanks,

-doug

Blog: http://www.VeeamMeUp.com

Twitter: @VMDoug or @Veeam