PALO ALTO, Calif., December 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced independent research convincingly proves that VMware customers are drastically lowering operational expenditures (OpEx) with VMware solutions. VMware vSphere™ and the VMware vCenter™ Product Family lower the day-to-day costs of running IT, enabling IT resources and budgets to be shifted from tactical maintenance to strategic projects that can better create value for the business. “Reducing OpEx with Virtualization and Virtual Systems Management,” a whitepaper prepared by ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) for VMware, quantifies how customers have been able to reduce service failures, improve staff efficiency, speed up service deployment and reduce facility operation costs using VMware solutions.
The whitepaper (available from this page), which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:

• Reduction of Service Failures – fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
• Improved Staff Efficiency – increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
• Faster Service Deployment – allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
• Reduced Facility Operation Costs – allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter

Full press release: VMware Lowers Operational Costs

See also:

• VMware – Company Profile
• VMware – official website
• Articles on VMware from this site

For example, if I right-click the VM and decide to reset it, instead of getting something like "You're about to reset the HOSTNAME.DOMAINNAME.COM virtual machine. Are you sure?", I only see this:

Annoying Reset Confirmation

I wonder if it's really hard to make these dialogs to be VM specific?

• What is VMware ESX server 3i (ESXi)
• VMware ESX and ESXi comparison – VMware KB article
• Networking differences between ESX and ESXi – yet another VMware KB document
• Differences between ESX and ESXi with a follow up Technical differences between ESX and ESXi

Luckily, there's a rather easy way to change the forgotten password to something new, and I thought I'll explain how it can be done.

Changing the root password on ESX server

You will need to have access to the serial console of the server which has your ESX installation, or access to keyboard and display attached directly to the same box.

To change the password, we'll follow this procedure:

1) Reboot ESX server.

Unfortunately, if you don't remember your root password, there won't be a clean way to reboot your server. Try to shutdown all the VMs running on it, and then power-cycle the box running ESX.

2) Boot ESX server in single user mode

In this mode, you won't be asked for a root password. When you see the following screen, press the "a" key:

… to change ESX kernel boot parameters. Your screen will look like this:

Now, simply type a space and "single" word, then press Enter:

Eventually, your ESX server will boot and give you a root command line prompt, which means you can do what you want from this moment on:

Assuming you want to change your root password, move on to the next step.

3) Change ESX root password to a new one

Simply type "passwd" and give your new password twice:

sh-2.05b# passwd
Changing password for user root.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

That's it! You have changed the ESX password! Now it's time to reboot the system and allow ESX server to come back up online.

4) Reboot ESX server once again

Type "reboot" and wait for the ESX server to come back online in a few minutes:

sh-2.05# reboot

Are you a seasoned ESX administrator? Do you solve the forgotten root password problem differently? Please share your opinions in the comments section.

See also:

• VMware on Desktop-Virtualization.com
• Official VMware Site

Last Friday saw the long-awaited release of VMware Server 2.0 beta 2, Build 84186.

New features in VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

VMware website highlights the following new features of this VMware Server 2.0 release:

Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.

Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.

Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.

New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.

Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.

Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

My impressions from VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

I didn't have much time to assess this release properly, but so far the impressions have been most positive ones:

- Beta download page – instead of filling in all the details on the VMware Server 2.0 download page, you can now simply specify your email used during a previous Server 2.0 beta registration, and skip straight to the EULA and then download links and registration keys. Sweet!

- VMware Infrastructure Web Access has gone through truly amazing transformation – it's very responsive and much more intuitive – I really like it

- Independent console – I've been longing for this functionality since the very beginning. It only makes sense that you can detach your console window from the rest of your browsing environment. Now, that's a remote console as it should be, definitely!

I'll continue my experiments and will be sure to post more in the coming weeks. For the moment though, I advise you to download VMware Server 2.0 beta 2 and explore it yourself.

See also:

• VMware Server 2.0 beta @ VMware
• VMware Server 2.0 – screenshots

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!

As it turned out after a quick investigation, that was a result of running a VM from a NTFS partition, because its default mounting settings don't have the exec option.

Since you shouldn't be running anything critical through an NTFS driver anyway, I simply moved the VM onto one of the ext3 partitions and, sure enough, it fixed the guest RAM allocation error.

Update: if your scenario prevents you from moving a VM to a native partition, use the following option:

mainmem.UseNamedFile = "FALSE"

You should add it to the vmx file of your VM. Thanks for the tip, benito!

At last, PowerPoint slides are available for all the VMworld Europe 2008 sessions and labs.

There's 16 videos for you to watch, and absolutely every session and lab has a set of slides available for download.

VMworld 2007 and VMworld Europe 2008 Attendees Only

Unfortunately, all these materials can only be accessed by VMworld 2007 and VMworld Europe 2008 attendees, so I can only hope that the best of these presentations become public soon enough.

If you didn't attend the VMworld events of the past 2 years, please browse the Free Sessions & Labs section – it has quite a collection of videos available to everyone.

Recommended sessions from VMworld Europe 2008

I can recommend the following few presentations, although many more are worth looking into as well.

• ESX Server best practices for performance
• Architecture and Deployment of VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2
• Architectural comparison of virtualization technologies

Have you been to VMworld Europe 2008 as well? Let me know which sessions you liked most by leaving a comment!

A vulnerability was found in VMware's shared folders mechanism that grants users of a Guest system read and write access to any portion of the Host's file system including the system folder and other security-sensitive files. Exploitation of these vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated Guest system to compromise the underlying Host system that controls it.

Successful exploitation requires that the Shared Folder's feature to be enabled which is the default on VMware products that have the feature AND at least one folder of the Host system is configured for sharing.

VMware Shared Folders vulnerability

All versions of VMware's hosted products that include the Shared Folders feature are vulnerable:

• VMWare Workstation 6.0.2
• VMWare Workstation 5.5.4
• VMWare Player 2.0.2
• VMWare Player 1.0.4
• VMWare ACE 2.0.2
• VMWare ACE 1.0.2

VMware Fix for Shared Folders vulnerability

VMware has just released the VMSA-2008-0005 advisory, announcing a number of critical security threats identified and fixed in the next releases of hosted products.
The following security vulnerabilities have been addressed:

1. Host to guest shared folder (HGFS) traversal vulnerability
2. Insecure named pipes
3. Updated libpng library to version 1.2.22 to address various security vulnerabilities
4. Updated OpenSSL library to address various security vulnerabilities
5. VIX API default setting changed to a more secure default value
6. Windows 2000 based hosted products privilege escalation vulnerability
7. DHCP denial of service vulnerability
8. Local Privilege Escalation on Windows based platforms by hijacking VMware VMX configuration file
9. Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) memory corruption resulting in denial of service

New versions of VMware hosted products

All the above security fixes are incorporated in the following new versions of VMware products, all available for an immediate download:

• VMware Workstation 6.0.3 (Build# 80004)
• VMware Workstation 5.5.6 (Build# 79688)
• VMware Server 1.0.5 (Build# 80187)
• VMware ACE 2.0.3 (Build# 80004) and VMware ACE 1.0.5 (Build# 79846)
• VMware Fusion 1.1.1
• VMware Player 2.0.3 (Build# 80004) and VMware Player 1.0.6 (Build# 80404)

Links:

• Core Security advisory: CORE-2007-0930
• VMware security advisory: VMSA-2008-0005

What is VMsafe?

VMsafe is a new security technology. What is means is that software security vendors will partner with VMware to develop custom virtual appliances used for protecting virtual machines on a VMware ESX server.

Each virtual appliance will be digitally signed and confirmed by VMware. Only trusted virtual appliances will get the privileges of a VMsafe technology, so even though VMsafe solutions are virtual machines, not every virtual machine can become a VMsafe solution – it needs to come from a trusted partner and go through a verification and certification procedures before customers can use it.

How does VMsafe work?

Like I said, each VMsafe solution is a virtual appliance with elevanted access. Essentially, it will have access to all the key functional areas of all the VMs on the ESX server, monitoring memory and CPU, virtual network adapters and storage.

VMsafe appliance has visibility of all the memory pages of every VM, and has the functionality to prevent a security breach on the memory page or CPU instruction level. Network packets are also analyzed on the fly, and the same kind of dynamic analysis is applied to all the storage available to a given VM.

The main advantage of a VMsafe approach is that it's a security solution which resides outside of any virtual machine. Being above all the VMs (or besides them should I say), VMsafe appliance gets unsurpassed flexibility and maintains the security level which simply was not achieved before: any malware, any virus which traditionally tries to detect and disable an anti-virus solution on your OS, will be left unaware of the fact that the VM is monitored for security at all.

Key benefits of VMsafe

These are a few:

Isolation - VMsafe security solutions reside in their own VM which makes it impossible for a malware running in any of the protected VMs to compromise the security appliance.

Correlation - having direct access to most of the functional areas of all theVMs allows for a deeper and better correlation between security threats – VMsafe appliances will be able to detect threats earlier and correctly recognize the scope (when all the VMs are under the same attack, for example, this should be detected as a single threat spanning a few VMs).

Scalability - being a tightly integrated part of virtual infrastructure, VMsafe appliances will allow for easier and more effective scalability, this will result in flexible and scalable protection of large virtual infrastructures.

See also:

• VMware VMsafe Security Technology
• VMsafe Technology announcement on VMworld Europe 2008

Last week, VMware updated their VDI solution and released the next generation of its desktop-specific connection broker – Virtual Desktop Manager.

Virtual Desktop Manager 2

Here's just a few of the features found in VDM2 (via Virtual Desktop blog):

• Full integration with VMware Infrastructure 3
• Support for higher availability using VMware HA
• Support for XP and Vista virtual desktops
• Extensive client support: XPe, XP, Vista, 2000 Pro, Linux and integrated thin client devices
• Automating suspending, powering off, powering on, destroying and resuming virtual desktops
• Live migration of running desktops using VMware VMotion
• Support for granular resource allocation using VMware DRS

See also:

• VMware VDI page