The Virtual Data Center

DISCLAIMER: This is long and the opinions are mine.

I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space. To me, these two players have always been the underdogs battling for the right to go head-to-head against VMware in the main enterprise (and now cloud) virtual data center event. I’ve long said here that I think Microsoft is in the best position to make that move, but to be honest, Citrix currently has better technology. In other words, Microsoft has a better strategic play, Citrix a better tactical play. The announcements that came of out Synergy last week prove that. Citrix knows what it’s doing and they know how to build virtualization products to compete with VMware.

As has been asked many times before, here and elsewhere: What would happen…what would be the benefit to the market…if Microsoft were to acquire Citrix and merge the best strategy and tactical solutions into one? The idea and rumor has been around for a while, so why am I revisiting it today? Since these rumors first started to really circulate in September of 2008 (around VMworld) there’s been very little advancement from the Microsoft camp on Hyper-V, and a tremendous amount of advancements from Citrix and the Xen products. We’re also seeing a few cases where the two have opted to work together. Case in point: the Essentials family for managing XenServer and Hyper-V VMs and storage. Citrix has made some excellent headway in the VDC with product announcements this year; that’s the real reason to take another look at this idea.For better or for worse, Microsoft and Citrix are already collaborating, both individually and to an extent togeter, to go after VMware. In the grand scheme of things why continue to do that on their own when they can do it together, mount one single offensive with one single goal, and bring enough technology to actually make a dent in VMware’s VDC footprint? Join forces and all that 2 against 1 stuff. Let’s look at a few categories where this makes sense, where Microsoft acquiring Citrix technology would go head to head against VMware and actually have a chance of winning:

• Networking and Application Delivery: To me recent movement from Citrix in this space is the paramount camel’s straw/tipping point for why Microsoft should finally take the leap. Citrix’s application delivery product line, NetScaler, has been a good appliance-based product for Citrix. Not a market leader, but they’ve held their own against F5 and Cisco. They manage application delivery well enough. With the announcement last week of NetScaler VPX, their virtual appliance version of MPX, NetScaler has made the leap into software-based application delivery, ala Zeus. This is huge for the acquisition discussion. First of all it could bring networking and application delivery into Microsoft’s world, something they’ve avoided with Hyper-V to date. Customers use virtualization for applications and they need to deliver those applications outside their data center. Couple VPX with the new software switch Citrix announced to compete against Cisco’s Nexus 1000v and you have the critical missing pieces for application deliver via Hyper-V (as well as another angle for Microsoft to compete against Citrix). And then add in the Citrix desktop and access-related apps for the non-MS platforms, like the iPhone, and Microsoft makes a huge push owning the application delivery stack from the VDC to the client, any client.
• VDI: Citrix has done an amazing job on virtualization geared towards the client. Going back to Metaframe and Presentation Server and then today with the work they’re doing with Xen on client virtualization, Citrix has always been focused on the client. Ironically, even though Microsoft is the de facto enterprise desktop client (in a sense), it hasn’t addressed the client virtualization markets too well. App-V is a step forward, but MED-V (with desktop virtualization code based on Virtual PC rather than Hyper-V) is a step back. VMware is making a huge push in this market with VMware View; if any player is going to win the VDC space completely they have to include a VDI solution, one that works locally and remotely, in their portfolio. Citrix could help Microsoft make that push by combining their respective solutions for hypervisor and application virtualization technologies. Many of the enterprise desktops and apps are Microsoft; the underlying technology running those desktops and apps in the data center and over the network are Citrix.
• Cloud Platforms/Providers: Xen owns a good bit of real estate in cloud and service provider data centers. Although Microsoft has good presence with customers running Windows operating systems, it doesn’t have the same exposure for Hyper-V as a platform that VMware and Xen have. I think MS is looking to change this with Azure but it will still be limited to the MS-only solution (for the short term anyway). Acquiring Citrix would give Microsoft that cloud provider mindshare by name alone. They could then take that business and technology model that Xen has built and create a best of breed service provider platform between Xen and Hyper-V for customers that want to run non-Windows apps on Xen and .Net-based apps on Hyper-V. This could drastically help Microsoft’s Oslo application lifecycle plan moving forward with cloud providers while not alienating non-.Net apps.
• Application Virtualization: As you know, I’m a huge fan of a true application virtualization model, something that I believe App-V will ultimately be able to deliver. However it will most likely be focused on .Net and Microsoft apps only and is still a few years away from full delivery and even more from adoption. In the mean time we have this bridging technology between VDI, client virtualization, and streaming apps. VMware is getting there with tools like View and ThinApp, but Citrix is staying in lockstep. Microsoft could use a Citrix acquisition to springboard App-V into a multi-focused application delivery platform, taking what’s good today with streaming apps and client virtualization and continue to work on true application virtualization for all apps.
• Customer/Device Support: And as a roll-up benefit of the above categories, we have application delivery to devices. I don’t want to place too much emphasis on supporting remote access via the iPhone, but when you look at Microsoft’s historic relationships with Apple and Linux (as a whole), of which Citrix has obvious ties into both now, that’s an appealing way for Microsoft to jump right into those groups. That doesn’t mean they’ll keep the momentum alive, but at least it would give them more opportunity than they have today. The overlap between VDI, XenApp, secure remote access, and the iPhone is an extremely appealing proposition for mobile users; a turn-key solution for Microsoft to cover a huge gap in their overall cloud and virtualization offerings.

And let’s be honest: Microsoft has had some challenges with their virtualization solutions and their overall direction. Client virtualization based on Virtual PC and no enterprise VDI solution? Hyper-V management hiccups through SCVMM/SCOM and delaying live migration for so long? Azure wanting to change the way applications run and are written on-premise? These raise questions in my mind, a lot of “Why?” questions. Citrix, on the other hand, is heading squarely in the right directly for virtualization solutions.  Citrix continues to plow ahead against VMware at a good pace, whereas Hyper-V isn’t quite at that same pace. The virtual switch announcement from Synergy last week is an excellent example; we haven’t seen any movement or advancements on virtual switching or networking for Hyper-V at all. Sophisticated virtual networking and switching management is an absolute critical component for virtual and cloud-based platforms, IMO. Moving internal roles and tasks to VMs running on the platforms is something we’ve seen for a while with VMware, even going so far as to running the full version of ESX 4.0 in a VM on top of ESXi 4.0. Citrix is doing the same with their Dazzle product. In other words both VMware and Citrix are finding optimized ways to use their own technology for their own benefit. We’re not seeing this today from Hyper-V. Again, there’s nothing to say that Microsoft acquiring Citrix would change that, but at least it might help grease the skids a bit towards internal product unification. Citrix knows how to do it well.

To be clear, I am not being critical of Microsoft technologies or business practices (as any long-time readers of my blog will undoubtedly know). I am suggesting that when compared on a chart, Citrix is closer today to where the market and VMware are going for virtual platforms, and if the goal is to compete with VMware for both enterprise and cloud virtual platforms then Microsoft could benefit in leaps and bounds by acquiring Citrix for both Xen and their networking products. Microsoft would get virtual platform, application, and networking tools that they don’t have today.

I’ll leave you with one final thought on how compelling a Microsoft/Citrix acquisition could be: Imagine a year from now if Azure launched out of beta running on both Xen and Hyper-V. This would be the best of both worlds: Microsoft could continue to push it’s current developer-based approach to Azure, SaaS, and application cloud computing, focusing on .Net and helping to push users to re-write their current and new apps. They could also support non-.Net customers by allowing them to run their services on Xen in Microsoft’s cloud. Customers wouldn’t have to choose based on their app needs. That would be the ultimate competitor to both Google and Amazon for cloud mindshare, bridging the two cloud models together and backed by the Microsoft brand.  Awesome. Will we ever see it? I hope so for market and customer needs.

“Wish You Were Here” Image © 1975 EMI, Storm Thorgerson

My favorite quote from RSA: “TheVirtualDC? Your blog is about virtualization and data centers, not security. Why do you even want to come to RSA?”*

Ahhh, finally back at the home office after two weeks of conferences: VMware Partner Expo in Orlando and RSA in San Francisco (with a pinch of SAP Virtualization Week thrown in the middle for flavor). It was a tiring trip but an excellent one for getting out in the field and talking to folks about virtualization and, as much as they would let me, security. I’ll have write-ups of each of the shows over the next week beginning with RSA today.

So RSA, we’ve known each other for years and sometimes you impress and sometimes you disappoint. I’d have to lean towards the latter this year; you really didn’t feel new and exciting. I was hoping that there would be a much larger virtualizaiton (and yes, cloud) security push this year than I saw, but the majority of what I witnessed in public (admittedly this was limited to the expo floor and partner-esque conversations due to a great list of analysts meetings that kept me from the general sessions) was the same ol’ same ol’: AV, IAM, UTM, network security, application security, FOBs on your iPhone, etc.

Now don’t get me wrong: obviously these are extremely important tools and technologies, but I guess I was expecting RSA to hold form and be more than the standard security show. If this year is any judge RSA will be returning to it’s pure security roots moving forward. Much like a storage show focuses solely on drives, data, and transport, RSA may be headed back to the days when us security geeks went to dig way down into the security internals. If that’s true, we had a few great years where RSA opened its arms to everyone. There was a time when it really felt that security was leading rather than following, and I just didn’t get that feeling with the show itself this year. The show felt like a necessary evil.

In contrast, the 1:1 meetings I had throughout the week were exactly as I’d hoped: Where’s security going? How can we use these security tools to create integrated solutions for the data center? What are the threats with cloud computing? How come virtual platform providers still haven’t moved beyond securing VMs and their flat virtual networks? Why is it still so easy to create VM trojans? Those were the amazing conversations I had outside RSA; talking with people who are passionate about security. But those interesting and productive conversations felt like we were whispering behind the gym in high school, as if we’d sneaked out of Physics 101 class to build our own rocket. And that alone, that feeling of making progress while the rest of the world remained stagnant, was worth the trip alone.

I know there were some great sessions on virtual and cloud security with Hoff, McKeay, and others that I didn’t witness first hand. I look forward to hearing/reading about those once RSA is officially done. And I can’t write a post about RSA without mentioning the excellent time I had at the RSA Security Bloggers Meetup 2009, another example of moving miles ahead outside of the organized show in just a few hours. Sure the drinks were flowing, but I still took copious mental notes and left excited with a smile on my face.

Anyway I’m already looking forward to next year, hoping that 365 days from today I’ll be writing about how far we’ve come in the past year on topics like virtual platform security. Until then I’ll just need to make sure I stay busy for the cause.

*In case you’re curious, that direct quote was made by someone working the show behind the scenes, someone extremely familiar with RSA. Awesome.

I’ve been heads-down for the past few weeks in product land so I haven’t had much time to poke my head up into the clouds. I’m now standing up straight again, stretching, and getting back to thinking about the larger macro issues that cloud presents. Today I’m going to talk about one very specific issue: overlapping IP addresses and spaces by users of a common cloud.

This topic was spawned by a comment to an earlier post on the cloud. Here’s the comment:

In the Virtual Data center deployments/cloud, do you see a chance of IP address clash with the subscribers? Subscribers would want to have freedom to select the IP addresses. In such cases, how the network setup will be?

Ravi, the commenter, brings up a great point. The cloud is shared computing space so that’s got to include the network, and unlike computing resources and other parts of the network, such as MAC addresses, which are always unique until exhausted, IP addresses are such a small, finite pool of unique identifiers they have to overlapp at some point. We’ve seen this for years with companies that acquire other companies and attempt to combine and merge two different networks that share overlapping private IP addresses. And on a much smaller scale with home router users that end up using default IP addresses, typically either 192.168.0/24 or 192.168.1/24; basically any of them if they don’t change the default Linksys/Netgear/D-Link setting.

Like home users, the concern with share IP addresses in the cloud isn’t with public IP addresses; those are governed and for the most part rigid. The problem is inside the cloud, where IPv4 cloud providers are limited to one of three banks of private, non-routable IP addresses: 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16. On their own, this range encompasses almost 18 million IPv4 addresses, which will be plenty for most cloud providers. However there are two issues for pause, even with a pool of 18 million IPs to choose from:

1. Extremely large cloud providers, such as AWS. It’s not unrealistic to imagine that Amazon could support at some point more than 18 million unique workloads at once (in this case workloads meaning applications tethered to a unique IP address). Even as they were to get close to that number, management of re-usable IP addresses would be a challenge. They would have to know by the second which workload was using which IP address, when that workload relenqueshes that IP address, re-assigning the IP, and then the technical challenge of ARP management with such high-volume IP turnover.
2. Cloud providers that accept pre-configured workloads, say from internal private clouds. Company A may have a series of applications, bundled together in something like VMware’s vApp, that all use IP addresses in 192.168.22/24. Company B may have an vApp bundle with an overlapping range, such as 192.168.20/22. Given a large enough customer pool using vApp in an external cloud provider, there will be customers that use overlapping IP addresses on the same cloud network, and these customer IP ranges most likely won’t fall on easily defined subnet borders.

So what’s the solution (ruling out IPv6 since Ravi is probably asking about IPv4)? Thankfully there are a number of tools available that will virtualize networks above layer 2, virtualizing the IP space in the same way that VLANs virtualize frames. To address this issue, a cloud provider can use some network management device that will virtualize layer 3 before or at the same time customer traffic in the cloud is translated (via NAT) from a public IP address to a private IP address. As a request for a service in the cloud comes into the cloud edge, the network or application management tool will recognize the request for a specific customer and move that request over to the segmented layer 3 network isolated for that specific customer. Very much in the same way we tag frames and ports with VLAN data, a segmented layer 3 network can be created with “tagged” IP addresses that are destined for different parts of the network.

Ravi hit a core requirement for the cloud: in a true multi-tenant environment, overlapping IP addresses must be supported and cloud customers must be able to select any IP address they’d like, either during service creation or as part of a pre-configured virtual application bundle. Customers need to be able to say “This application must use this IP address” and not have to worry about the cloud provider returning a “Sorry, IP address already in use” error. So to answer his question, yes, I absolutely see a need for overlapping IP addresses inside the cloud, but as long as the cloud is built to support that architecture, overlapping IP addresses shouldn’t be a problem for cloud customers.

After pushing my latest post, Securing the Cloud: Shared Hardware and the Data Plane, Hoff posted a series of excellent questions and responses to the post via Twitter. I thought responding via another blog post, so that his questions could be addressed alongside my last post, was the way to go. I’ve trimmed some of his questions here for brevity but all of his questions can be found on his Twitter stream. And here we go.

@thevirtualdc I hate to tell you this, but your last blog isn’t about securing “the Cloud” at all. You are interchanging cloud & virt…

You are correct that I am presumptively interchanging the cloud with virtualization within the cloud. The primary point of this series of cloud security posts is to break out all the areas that securing the cloud entails, taking a huge topic that many people are discussing and breaking it down into small bits. A very large bite of those small bits, in my opinion, is the platforms that run each individual cloud. It’s been my experience that the majority (definitely not all) of cloud providers right now, and the customers that are seeking out these cloud providers, are using some form of virtual platforms. This is an assumption I’ve discussed here before. I’m definitely not saying virtualization=the cloud, but rather that most cloud implementations rely somewhat on virtual platforms. Virtual platforms introduce a layer of transparency in cloud providers; a customer who choose a provider that’s running virtual platforms will most likely know what that platform choice and what version it’s running. To that extent, the security of those platforms is paramount to the security of the cloud itself.

@thevirtualdc …not that they aren’t related, but by lumping everything into the IaaS bucket (which is what you are essentially doing)…

I’m not necessarily lumping all cloud providers into the IaaS bucket. Non-IaaS providers, such as AWS, Azure, and Terremark, are cloud providers that build their solutions on top of virtual platforms. These are the types of cloud providers that fall into my assumptive clause above. I’m not so concerned in this post with what those providers are doing with virtual platforms or how they’re marketing their service, but rather the fact that they are running shared virtual platforms and relying on shared data plane management from companies that are outside their control. No matter how they’re implementing these technologies, the customers are trusting the providers and the providers are trusting the platforms (along with a ton of other pieces in the cloud puzzle that I’ll delve into later as part of this continuing series) to keep things secure. Basically I’m talking here about any cloud provider that’s implementing a solution on top of stadard virtual platforms.

@thevirtualdc I totally buy everything you wrote, except you decided to call it Cloud instead of Virt which will add 2 the confusion.

I completely agree with you on this one. Goodness knows I get all up in arms about terminology and definitions when it comes to technology, but the choice to lump a discussion about virtual platform and shared data security under the Cloud nameplate was intentional. I want people who are looking at the cloud, who are looking at security concerns in the cloud, to start thinking about security risks of what’s actually running most of the cloud. For example, a major cloud provider recently discussed their solution for cloud security was to deploy individually managed distributed firewalls for their customers. That’s good, but has nothing to do with the security concerns of the virtual platforms that are running those distributed firewalls. That’s the reason I want to associate virtual platform security with cloud security. Sure, there are providers and customers that won’t need to worry about this, but I believe the majority of both will. I don’t want people to think that the cloud is magical and mystical. It’s not; most of it is running some of the same software that we’re running in the enterprise, software that’s highly prone to security breaches.

Hoff concluded with this comment, which I’m unable to find in his Twitter stream but is available via Google cache:

 @thevirtualdc What about folks who use Xen derivatives…like the 800lb gorilla of Cloud, Amazon?

You are correct; I omitted Xen from my “take responsibility” list in that post. Xen introduces a different element that’s slightly harder to control: the OEM’ing and open-source nature of their solution(s). There’s no question that a provider like Amazon who’s depending on Xen as their platform foundation should be concerned about the security of that platform, however, Xen has the ability to be modified (to varying degrees). With respect to security, this makes it much more difficult for Citrix to be ultimately responsible for a secure running environment. The ESX hypervisor is always the same. The Xen hypervisor may be different across every implementation. That introduces risks to the data plane that are much harder to control. Still as critical but it’s harder to lump Citrix in the same bucket as Microsoft and VMware in this scenario for that reason. Regardless, you are correct in that I should have addressed this in my last post.

As always the feedback from Hoff is much appreciated and enjoyed. Even if I’m way off the planet on this (and most of what I wax about here) at least it contributes to the discussion and makes us think about these things. Security risks associated with virtual platforms and not controlling the data plane won’t directly impact all cloud providers or all cloud customers. But it will impact a good number of them, and the fact that we’re not looking to these technology creators (ie the platform vendors) to lead the way and create safe computing environments for shared data…well, that keeps me awake at night.

Frequent readers will understand my love of lists, my affinity for the 4D attack plan methodology (Define, Design, Develop, Deploy), and my need to break things into small addressable (bite-sized) chunks. Over the past week I’ve been laying the groundwork for securing the cloud; not the technical “Use this VM, configure these VLANs, tether the clients this way” stuff but the larger macro business planning for techies on securing the cloud. Today follows suit in the Define category, going straight to the hardest problem first in cloud security: securing shared data plane resources: CPU, RAM, and bus.

Like it or not, we’re going to have to address and solve security of physical computing resources in the cloud sooner rather than later. And by sooner I mean now. First thing. Put down your VM security appliance and step away from your network and packets. This morning. Stop what you’re doing because I’m about ruin the image and the plan that you’re used to*. We need to figure out how to secure VM computing traffic over shared resources like CPU, RAM, and bus – the data plane implemented by virtual platforms and thus the backbone of the dynamic cloud. We’re going to deal with near-limitless attack vectors across all parts of the cloud but if we don’t secure the running environment first then we’ll be asking for someone to find an open door and take our virtual CPUs, our virtual networks, our virtual I/O.

Tools like VMware’s vShield Zones are good starts but they don’t go deep enough (at least from what about Zones today; I’ll know more after the Partner Exchange in April), managing policies and trust levels in the zones down to the bit level, not just the packet level. Exploits against the physical and virtual data planes will make network and application attacks looks like child’s play because the data plane owns the transport and storage of the targets of those attack. It’s going straight to the source. It will allow attacks from inside the cloud out through all those oh-so-useful networking and framework tools that have built up the cloud. It’s a like a microwave: attack the molecules from the inside.

Saying we’re going to do it is one thing, actually doing it is something different. Many moons ago I wrote a three-part piece about the hypervisor/platform vendors taking responsibility for their own virtual space. Their virtual CPUs, their virtual switches, their virtual IPC between host and guests; these items can all easily be secured by the vendors. But what about securing data in the hardware and the step that moves data from virtual software to the hardware? That, too, is mostly the platform vendors, but not all. With virtualization now happening in the CPU, securing that shared data in transit will require the platform vendors to work with the hardware manufacturers to address the problem and establish trust. How can the CPU trust bits from the hypervisor are safe and vise versa?

So how are the manufacturers and vendors going to do that? Easy: the platform vendors will need to create dedicated virtualization security teams that include working with hardware vendors, and start talking about this today. Get the word out that this is a critical issue and concern. Sound familiar? See, it’s all coming together to form an easily manageable plan of attack and execution for securing the cloud from the inside-out. But we have to start somewhere, and I prefer to start with the most difficult task first, the core issue and technologies at the center of the cloud, and then move out from that.

You’re reading this Microsoft and VMware, right? I thought so, just wanted to make sure.

*Yes, I did just borrow and paraphrase the opening line from The Humpty Dance, thank you very much.

I like lists. There’s no getting around my need to itemize everything, and surprisingly this is something that comes up in my every day life, every day. I even had a debate with someone recently on the proper way to structure pro and con lists: I prefer horizontal (pros listed first, then cons), she prefers vertical (pros on the left, cons on the right). Regardless of your pro/con list display preference, lists are critical to the way I think about things. This is most true when coming up with ideas about technology. Today’s list focuses on security in the cloud: How can we possibly tackle such a beast of a problem? Easy, with a list.

As I’ve talked about a good bit recently, security in the cloud is something we’re all currently thinking about and about to face head-on. But the phrase “securing the cloud” is a misnomer; we can no more easily secure the generic cloud than we can secure the entire generic internet. The cloud is made up of many, many pieces that start at a core center (the computing platform resources) and move out to the edge (the network). But that’s only one cloud; The Cloud (as we say) is actually made up of limitless smaller clouds where data is processed locally and then pushed out to another cloud for more processing.

With this in mind, let’s stop thinking about the insurmountable task of securing The Cloud and instead start looking at securing various parts of these micro-clouds. If we can secure the smaller parts then it will be easy to piece these together as we need (a jigsaw coming together if you will) to build out a complete cloud solution. So here’s the list: What smaller parts of the cloud should we start securing today?

• Secure the platforms: Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, hypervisors, virtual switching, segmentation of VM roles
• Secure the frameworks: Those wrappers around the platforms that control provisioning and resource management, tools that manage the data in and out of the cloud to the platforms
• Secure the network: Standard network security can be apply here but it needs to be managed in parallel with the other cloud delivery security solutions
• Secure the applications: The data receivers from the frameworks. Standard application security can apply here but should have the same requirements as securing the network (ie in context) and be paired with platform security
• Secure the endpoints: Doesn’t matter if an endpoint is a traditional client technology or another cloud (remember the good ol’ days of extranets? Yeah, let’s start calling them extraclouds!), anything responsible for seeding data into or receiving data out of the cloud needs to be secured and trusted
• Secure the edge: Just like the endpoints the edge needs to be secured to validate and protect data as it’s coming in and out; the Cloud Sentry
• Secure the Cloud<->Cloud connections: This is really an amalgam of edge and client security, but unlike the model today where we secure each independently, the Cloud<->Cloud security controls need to validate all data and connections in context to make sure that the data that’s supposed to be in the cloud is correct (it may be secure data before this point but now we need to look at it in context of these two clouds talking to each other)

This nice thing about breaking these items out in a list is that no single group has to tackle everything. The cloud providers are in the unique place where they can become the Secure Cloud Project Managers, but even then they’re relying on other groups to fulfill their end of the bargain by supplying secure solutions from each of their areas of expertise. Divide and conquer!

There’s no way that securing the giant cloud can be successful if we try to do it all at once and with only one solution. We need multiple solutions working together, and to get to those solutions we need to enter the first two phases of tackling a project: Define and Design.

Now that I’ve done the work of Defining the smaller, bite-sized categories for you, let’s go ahead and start securing each of those categories. Ready? ’cause this is going to take years…

My heart is truly warmed (which isn’t easy) by all the talk around cloud security. This may mark the first time in my career that I’ve seen a non-security bleeding-edge technology (c’mon, the cloud is bleeding like a sieve) hit the market coupled with concerns and ideas about security. Even if we look to the virtual foundation of the cloud, none of those technologies (hypervisors, virtual CPUs, shared RAM, storage virtualization, etc) hit the market with any care or concern about security. In this way the cloud is creating a new model of accessible computing in more ways than one.

But all the talk still isn’t enough. I know, I’m never happy. The talk needs to lead to action, and that action should be led by the big three platform vendors: Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix. Regardless of how they’re addressing the cloud in public with marketing and solutions right now, these three platforms provide the backbone (figuratively, not as in networking) for both service provider and enterprise cloud computing. There are limitless other components to the cloud I’ve talked about before, but all of those components have some reliance on solutions from one of these three vendors. Sure, you can argue that the cloud can happen without any Microsoft, VMware, or Citrix technology, but that argument would be so short it wouldn’t be worth the coffee that was ordered for the argument. So keeping in tone with most of my recent posts, this is a call to arms for the big three: Why don’t you each have very public virtual security teams canvasing the globe to gather data and offer solutions?

Here’s what I’d like to see from Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix:

1. A massive evangelical thought leadership virtual security push. I’m talking a carpet bomb attack where all you do it talk, talk, talk about the risks associated with security of virtualiztion and in the cloud. It doesn’t have to be accompanied by solutions at this stage, just spread the word and solicit feedback. I want to see deep technical security tracks at VMworld and MS TechEd. I’ll save a suggested list of topics for another post (’cause I got ‘em). At this point in the plan topics should cover all three types of virtual security.
2. Cloud security teams: It’s not enough to offer cloud services like Azure and AWS, you need to offer cloud security services as well. It (I’m generalizing here with the ‘it’ part) should be a click button when I provision a new system or service. There should be a toll-free number that I can call right now and ask Amazon what they use to secure storage calls over HTTP, or call MS and ask how they guarantee my sensitive traffic can’t leak across VLANs. I don’t want to search for it, I don’t want to submit a ticket, I want this information right in front of me and at my fingertips. And I want the people answering those calls to be security experts.
3. Behind-the-scenes security swat teams. As I’ve discussed before, virtual pentesters looking for ways to exploit hypervisors, to escape the guest, working with Intel and AMD on security risks of moving logic to the CPU, to MitM bus traffic as it moves from one CPU to another. I’m not picky on whether they publicly disclose this information (that’s not true, I would prefer they do but understand why they wouldn’t want to yet) so long as their doing the research today.
4. And finally, a single funnel-up management of all these teams. I want the hypervisor security team to work side-by-side with the cloud platform deployment teams. It does no good if these teams aren’t a single entity with weekly triage meetings. The evangelist who’s talking to an ISP in Japan needs to know the person back at HQ who’s responsible for securing traffic into the cloud data center. And no using the term ‘virtual teams’ here for the obvious reasons, and for the not-as-obvious reason that these need to be real teams that do nothing but cross-technology security research.

Not only will this plan help propel security of virtualization and the cloud, it will also do wonders for customers who are looking at the cloud for mission-critical apps. If I know how to deploy a secure vApp in my internal cloud, know how to secure the channel to move that vApp to my external cloud provider, and know that they are monitoring the security of my application data on the wire and on the bus, then I’m much more likely to move forward with a complete cloud model. Security geeks and business units unite! I want this group to explain to the world the security risks of VDI and how those compare/contrast to security risks of client virtualization.

I’ve heard from so many people in the field (partners, customers, friends) that virtual security isn’t a concern today, and that’s good news. But will you be ready when it is a concern, and who will you turn to for help getting ready? Hopefully you’ll be able to rely on your platform and cloud providers, so start asking them  your questions now.

As reported by Practical Technology yesterday, Citrix has announced that it will be giving away XenServer (the hypervisor portion of their acquired Xen solution) for free. Very similar to the VMware model, they will continue to charge for management and advanced features as add-ons to the XenServer platform but the core virtualization technology will be available for free. Will this have any impact in their market share or their stake in the virtual data center? I’m skeptical for a number of reasons:

1. Free doesn’t always mean better, and usually it’s the exact opposite. I’m reluctant to think that enterprise customers and mission-critical cloud providers will take the free route solely to save money. Maybe that’s more likely this year than last but I’m still not sold it will make that much of an impact, especially since this won’t be an OSS offering ala XenSource. They’re also competing up-stream against VMware’s ESXi and Hyper-V, both of which have value-add above and beyond the hypervisor. For Citrix to make this move work they’re going to have to prove that they have the same type of value-add with XenServer that the other two big players offer. And free doesn’t count as value where your mission critical apps are concerned.
2. They’re relying heavily on management solutions to bring in the money for XenServer customers. We all know you can’t deploy a truly reliable virtualization solution without having management. In practice free deployments of XenServer will be few and far between, instead they will be bundled with some management solution. But which one? If MS System Center will manage both Hyper-V and XenServer, then we’re back to that value-add question for MS shops. If I’ve already deployed MS SCOM/SCVMM then what’s the value in deploying a Citrix solution instead of Hyper-V — which is also integrated into my server platform? VMware shops will stick with VMware because they’re the only company that has an end-to-end solution today. So is management the golden ticket for Citrix?
3. They’re announcing a new partnership with Microsoft. Excluding their existing partnership (whether that partnership has benefitted Citrix is a decently debatable topic so let’s gloss over those particulars for now) — Has a partnership with Microsoft between competing companies ever worked out for the non-Microsoft partner? Yes, MS is an excellent partner resource for technologies that don’t compete, but really, this partnership (and the ability to manage XenServer) will drastically benefit Microsoft by extending their heterogeneous virtual management solutions with Systems Center. I don’t see it going the other way for Citrix. Again, we’re going back to the value for a complete solution and who offers the most value here: Microsoft or Citrix? My vote is very strongly printed in the Microsoft column.

Maybe this will work in Citrix’s favor by at least getting XenServer in more hands to play with, and maybe their technology value will bubble to the top. But how many times have we watched a better technology (assuming XenServer is better) go by the wayside because they didn’t offer enough business value? In this case, I question whether a free XenServer offers any business value above and beyond what Hyper-V or VMware ESXi already offer.

As I mentioned last week I attended the first in a four-part series on Cloud Computing hosted by WTIA (next meeting at Amazon btw, really looking forward to that).

While none of the presentations at the first meeting involved security, it was ever-present in my mind throughout the evening. This is how my mind works: someone talks about distributing processes across multiple CPUs and I think “New area for MitM attack? Plant one bad instruction and DoS the whole thing, or worse, siphon off all proc data?” One area that stuck with me since that evening was the security within each of the vertical cloud infrastructure levels (top down: App, Platform, Language, Hardware, according to Aaron Kimball) and more specifically how future security threats may impact each of those levels.

For example, what happens when there is an exploit in the Language layer, one that is inherited all the way up the App and spans multiple Apps? And then what happens if the Hardware layer (the IaaS component) is told to spin, down, or delete VMs based on App events? Cloud services are made up of many moving and interdependent components. An exploit in any one piece can be felt across the entire platform, or the Cloud Stack if you will. An exploit in the middle could traverse the cloud stack up one way and then down the other.

So why is this different than the risk against localized data center components today? Two reasons:

1. All four cloud stack layers are inter-related and equally shared. A fully fledged cloud system could pull any number of solutions from any layer and plug them together.
2. Traditional data center computing is linear and uni-directional: requests come in, wait, responses go out, rinse, repeat. With the cloud data becomes non-linear and multi-directional. Simply stated, there are more ways to get at the payload. It becomes more difficult to exploit an entire system when you only have access through one door. However with the multi-entry architecture of the cloud there are more doors (and windows and crawlspaces and attics). Rather than all beating down one door, attackers can flank the cloud and attack multiple entry points.

It’s these differences that give me pause. More than any other attackable group of technologies (desktop OS, server OS, network, web apps, etc) I believe attacks against any part of the cloud structure represent more of a business threat than a pure security threat. Business are going to come to rely so heavily on the cloud that the cloud will soon host a good portion of their mission critical data (to what level it’s not already today). If there’s a major public exploit against the pieces of the cloud that everyone has access to, well then that’s no good for anyone, or their proprietary data.

And what about ownership and responsibility? What liability will AWS or Azure have if there’s a breach in the App Infrastructure (outside their control) that trickles down to the Hardware level (inside their control)?  How can we expect the really large cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft to respond? Will we see a new market and need for Incident Responders solely focused on the cloud? Jet Fighters if you will – yes, my goal is to push these Cloud analogies as far as I can, and the sky’s the limit (see, this will be fun!).

These are the ideas I worry about with the cloud. I would love to see more time and focus put on analyzing the risks for both cloud providers and end-user businesses pushing their services into the cloud on shared platforms. Sounds like an excellent job for my first batch of security recruits: Jet Fighters in Training.

I’ve hinted in the past on my ultimate application virtualization scenario – where I want the market to be for deploying and supporting remote applications for clients in the future. I’m still working on that giant whiteboard architecture map in my basement on what AppVirt looks like from the DC computing side, but today I want to write about the client side of that architecture. And while brevity has eluded me in all parts of my lingual life recently, I’m going to try to be succinct here (expect failure).

I attended the first of a four-part series on Cloud Computing last night held by the WTIA, which included an excellent presentation by Aaron Kimball from Cloudera on the basics of the cloud from the data point of view. Having retired the engineer title for marketing a few years ago, it always makes me happy to see someone who spends their career designing complex systems stand up and give an intro presentation that also includes the business benefit. So often engineers address the How rather than the What and the Why, and Aaron did an excellent job with the latter.

His presentation, along with others last night, got me thinking about what application virtualization in the cloud would look like to the client (and I’m not talking about GMail here).  Let’s look at a real example:

I bought a Mac a few months ago primarily to run Lightroom, so I spec’d out the Mac to go high-end because it would be running a very beefy photo application (along with Photoshop in the future I’m sure). The machine also had to run VMware Fusion in parallel (no pun intended; sorry to my Parallel friends) - I have a photo stitching application that’s currently Windows-only. Standard operation keeps me stable at 75% RAM and 40% CPU on average.

But what if I didn’t need to buy local computing resources and everything was processed remotely? Let’s jump ahead 10 years (a big leap, I know) and look at how this could be different if client apps were in the cloud.

I buy a local processing machine that’s drastically stripped down from my current Mac. I boot this machine to a web browser, where I head over to Adobe and say “This is Alan; I need to run Lightroom.” Adobe says “No problem. Let me push down the secure Lightroom App Shell. Ok, now you’re ready. Here’s a list of your albums pulled from Amazon S3.” I say “I need to process the latest batch of Mt. Baker HDR images.”  HDR images take a substantial amount of computing power to process, so Adobe comes back and says “No problem. I’m going to need 2gig RAM and a dedicated CPU core for this, but your monthly subscription only covers 1gig and .5 core. I’ll charge you $0.021/minute if you’d like to burst.”  I say “Great, let’s do it.”

Amazon then pulls its own resources from AWS and start distributing my HDR processing over thousands of machines/cores/RAM, all controlled from my local Lightroom App Shell. To me it’s displayed as one 8ghz core (remember, 10 years from now:) ), but in practice that value is an aggregate of distributed resources pooled from thousands of machines.I process my HDRs, they’re stored back in my Lightroom library which is managed by Adobe.com, I take my tiny laptop over to the client’s office, rinse, repeat.

But what if I don’t want the processing done exclusively in the cloud? I mean after all the above scenario is very similar to what I can do today with a web browser. What if instead my local computing platform is moderately beefy and I process everything locally. But as my machine starts to bog down from stitching together HDR panoramas it uses the Lightroom App Shell to request raw computing resources from AWS, and I become part of the distributed cluster? I scale and process background tasks remotely and only use my local resources for rendering the images to my display. My machine is part of the cluster and the line between local and remote processing becomes blurred. That’s some cool client-based application virtualization. The application running state is spread across elastic resources, of which my local resources are a part of.

True application virtualization will be a huge undertaking and this is simply one part and one idea. But why not think big? Go for the gusto I say. Oh, and there’s more here, but I’ve long since crossed the brevity line. Maybe more later.