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Xen Demonstrates Virtualization on Future Intel VT-Enabled Chips

XenSource, the software company behind the open source Xen hypervisor for virtual machine partitioning on X86 and X64 machines, is making its first public demonstration of the Xen 3.0 hypervisor this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. XenSource and Intel tested Xen 3.0 on a server using the future "Montecito" Itanium processors, which are Intel's first dual-core Itaniums and also the first of its chips to be equipped with its Virtualization Technology (VT), which does a lot of the instruction set virtualization work that prior VM solutions had to do before VT (and the functionally equivalent "Pacifica" features in AMD's Opteron chips) came along. VT and Pacifica are expected in production chips from Intel and AMD next year. According to Simon Crosby, vice president of strategy and corporate development at XenSource, the demonstration involved running a legacy version of Linux (he believed it was the Linux 2.0 kernel) in one partition running alongside Windows XP SP2 in a separate partition.

The demo was done on a pre-release version of Xen 3.0, which is out for community review now and is expected to be released by the Xen project leader, Ian Pratt, sometime later this summer. Crosby says that Intel contributed the code necessary for the Xen hypervisor to interface with the VT features of its future chips, and that the Xen project expects that AMD will do the same when it finishes up Pacifica. Xen is also working on an abstraction layer called VMX that will interface with both VT and Pacifica to mask the differences that Intel and AMD have taken to delivering hardware-assisted virtualization. VT and Pacifica are what allow unmodified guest operating systems to be managed by the Xen hypervisor. VT also interfaces with modified, open source operating systems that have Xen hooks in them (such as Linux, the BSD variants of Unix, and OpenSolaris), a privileged mode of operation called para-virtualization, which makes a guest operating system aware that it can be virtualized and therefore provides it with some extra goodies in terms of performance and optimization.

Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate Due Next Month

It's looking more and more like attendees of Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles three weeks from now will be receiving a near release-quality version of Visual Studio 2005, the new development environment that Microsoft intends to formally launch on November 7. S. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, said in a blog posting earlier this week that Microsoft is shooting for a September date for a Release Candidate (RC) of the development tools. "Visual Studio 2005 RC1 offers significant enhancements and greater quality over our previous beta releases," Somasegar wrote. "RC will be made available to our MSDN subscribers, early adopters, and beta customers." At the same time it launches Visual Studio 2005 RC1, Microsoft intends to introduce Beta 3 of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS), says Somasegar, adding that TFS is Microsoft's server-based product for team collaboration and is part of the Visual Studio 2005 wave of products. The Beta 3 of Visual Studio 2005 TFS will include a Go Live license, which enables testers to put it into limited production. The final version of Visual Studio 2005 TFS is scheduled to ship the first quarter of 2006.

Scots Move to Windows After Lifting the Kilt on Linux

One of the most visible backers of open-source software in the government sector has given up on Linux and is making the switch to Windows. The Central Scotland Police organization has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft to migrate its Sun Microsystems StarOffice desktop applications of 1,000 users to PCs equipped with Windows XP and Windows Office, and to move some Linux-based document management applications to Windows Server 2003 systems and Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server. The police force, which claimed it saved modest amounts of money by moving to open-source software in 2000, expects to save about 30 percent on maintenance and 25 percent on IT staffing with Windows as compared to open-source software. Apparently, the police force had integration issues with the open-source setup that required costly manual intervention. Despite the IT overhaul, which was started this month and must be completed in time to meet the country's deadline for implementation of its Freedom of Information Act, the police force will maintain some open-source systems. A spokesman reiterated that the department's decision was based entirely on business needs and not ideology.

Microsoft Investigating Serious IE Flaw

Microsoft is investigating a newly discovered flaw in its Internet Explorer Web browser that could expose users to attacks. A memory corruption resulting from loading a maliciously formed ActiveX object could enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the system. The flaw, which was given a "high risk" rating by The SANS Institute, affects IE version 5 and 6, but is only apparent on computers on which the "msdds.dll" file has been installed. This msdss.dll file is not loaded by default, and is typically loaded only on machines running the first release of Visual Studio 2002, although Office XP Service Pack 3 users are "at risk," Microsoft says. While Microsoft says it is not aware of any attacks exploiting the vulnerability, The SANS Institute says there is exploit code available on the Internet. There are several options to protect yourself until Microsoft issues a patch for the vulnerability, including disabling ActiveX support on IE, using a browser that does not support ActiveX (such as Mozilla's Firefox), or running one of several scripts that provide the "kill bit" for that particular dll file. Microsoft's next regularly scheduled monthly patch release is Tuesday, September 13. For more information, see Microsoft Security Advisory 90626.

Zotob Removal Tool Available From Microsoft

An updated version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool that zaps the Zotob worm from infected Windows 2000 computers was released last week by the vendor following several high-profile outbreaks (see "Windows 2000 Worm Wreaks Havoc"). Despite the decidedly negative impact that Zotob had on CNN (which struggled to put the Lou Dobbs Tonight broadcast together manually after some of its production systems were brought down by the worm) and the San Diego County government (whose 12,000 Windows 2000 computers, handling such things as wedding licenses and building permits, were taken offline for up to a day), Microsoft labeled the worm with a low-severity level, saying that "only a small number of customers have been affected" by the worm. That is certainly true compared to the Blaster and Sasser worms of years past. But not everybody agreed with Microsoft's assessment of the Zotob worm and its many variants, which can spread across networks without requiring a user to open any software or files. Antivirus software vendor McAfee, for one, rated Zotob a "high risk" worm.

IDC Projects IT Spending to Grow 5.9 Percent Through 2009

The prognosticators at IDC have taken a stab at predicting where the worldwide market for IT goods and services will be in 2009, and according to its most recent models, IT spending will hit $1.3 trillion by the end of that year. The growth represents a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 percent, compounded over the five years from 2004 through 2009. While this in not the high growth we saw in the dot-com era, it is better than a sharp kick in the teeth, which is what the decline in IT spending was like in 2001 and 2002. As is always the case in the IT market, there are hot and cold spots when it comes to spending. Anne Songtao Lu, the IDC analyst in charge of monitoring worldwide vertical markets, said in a report that spending will be highest in government, manufacturing and banking, but the highest growth in spending will be in the healthcare and the communications/media industry. In the latter vertical market, for instance, IDC reckons that IT spending will grow from $95 billion in 2005 to $128 billion by 2009, driven by heavy investment in networking gear, new PCs, peripherals, and storage. IDC is projecting that consumer spending on IT services, peripherals, and PCs will grow in the double digits over this term, obviously pulling up the averages for spending among corporations if the two together are only hitting a compound growth rate of just under 6 percent. Because of changing regulations and compliance issues, the banking and financing industry is expected to spend big bucks, too, but IDC didn't elaborate on growth rates. The analysts also expect the telecommunications industry to upgrade their IT infrastructure as they roll out more so-called 3G (third generation) services for their telecom customers.