In the past few years, computer worms are seen as one of significant challenges of cloud computing. Worms are rapidly changing and getting more sophisticated to evade detection. One major issue to defend against computer worms is collecting worms’ payloads to generate their signature and study their behavior. To collect worms’ payloads, we identified challenges for detecting and collecting worm...

System virtualization allows resources of a single physical machine to be shared among multiple virtual machines (VMs). This can increase system flexibility, but it can also invalidate some assumption that the OS running in a VM has about the system it is executing on. This paper surveys the implementation of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in a virtualized environment. It examines two proposal...

This white paper describes the benefits and performance of the latest Dell™ PowerEdge™ R810 running Microsoft® SQL Server® in VMware® vSphere™ 4.0 Update 1 (U1) and EqualLogic™ PS6000XV iSCSI storage arrays. The Dell PowerEdge R810 offers an ideal platform to consolidate demanding virtual database workloads in space conscious datacenters. The R810 also offers energy efficiency features in a den...

Corporate adoption of new server virtualization technologies offered by VMWare, Microsoft, the open source community (Xen) and others raises both new opportunities and new risks for system security. Security issues of virtualization have received some attention in trade periodicals and journals, but a comprehensive and authoritative understanding of virtualized system security under current mod...

Virtualized systems such as Xen, VirtualBox, VMWare or QEmu have been proposed to increase the level of security achievable on personal computers. On the other hand, such virtualized systems are now targets for attacks. We propose an intrusion detection architecture for virtualized systems, and discuss some of the security issues that arise. We argue that a weak spot of such systems is domain z...

Large advances have been made in hardware and every level of the software stack since the virtualized Hadoop tests published in April 2013. This paper shows how to take advantage of these advances to achieve maximum performance. The cluster size remains at 32 two-processor 2U hosts; however, the processor, memory, network, and storage capabilities are all roughly doubled from those reported in ...

Virtualization plays a major role in helping the organizations to reduce the operational cost, and still ensuring improved efficiency, better utilization and flexibility of existing hardware. "Virtualization is both an opportunity and a threat says Patrick Lin, Senior director of Product Management for VMware" [4]. This paper presents a literature study on various security issues in virtualizat...

We present a summary of our evaluation of VMWare ESX Server 2.5.2. In particular we confirm and work around known timing issues with guest operating systems running on ESX server. Our work validates and adds to the work of other groups modeling the behavior of ESX Server during CPU intensive workloads by exploring in more detail the effects of Hyper-Threading and the overhead of Virtual SMP. We...

Hosting virtual servers on a shared physical hardware by means of hardware virtualization is common use at data centers, web hosters, and research facilities. All virtualization platforms include isolation techniques that restrict resource consumption of the virtual guest systems. Therefore, they setup quotas for the virtual guest systems on the use of processors, memory, and hard disk of the h...