Virtualisation's 10 commandments of destruction

• Tags:
• Performance,
• Revenue,
• Security,
• Virtualisation

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Jun 2009 15:02 BST

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6. Destroy security attackers

Much promised but still commercially absent, the self-healing power of virtual machines remains one of the biggest what-ifs in the business. Because a virtual machine turns hardware into software, you get the ability to easily stop it, scan it, and detect and reverse changes, without any of the software on that virtual machine being aware that anything's going on. Unauthorised changes designed to evade operating system or resident scanners just can't be hidden from virtual hardware.

7. Destroy security enforcers

The flip side of a virtual machine's inherent resistance to malware is that it will also shrug off DRM, encryption and other approaches to restricting access to data. No matter how robustly coded the software, there will come a point when the secured data has to be in plain to be useful — and at that point, stop the VM and examine memory. If an attacker gets that far, it's a security breach that can bypass practically everything. And that's saying nothing of the ease of stealing a virtual machine through a compromised network, for the attacker to deconstruct at their leisure.

8. Destroy physical threats

Physical machines are vulnerable to physical events, and they are expensive and difficult to replicate. If your house burns down with your laptop in it, then you've lost everything.

If your house burns down with your virtual machine in it, you have a copy on your keyfob, one at the office and one on an ISP halfway around the world.

9. Destroy peak performance

You get nothing for nothing, and virtualisation will always come at the cost of never quite being able to run at the same top speed as native software running directly on native hardware. Unlike other destructions, though, this is purely temporary: the same virtual machine will run on the next generation of hardware and the one after that, long after the original hardware is completely outclassed.

10. Destroy the status quo

Intel has made its billions through the x86 instruction set. Having its processor hardware be compatible with existing software is everything.

And Intel isn't always at the top of the game of making silicon run swiftly. There have been faster rivals — rivals brought down by lack of compatibility. But if the world is used to running virtual machines and a new technology — maybe not even silicon-based — turns up with a basic processing device that leapfrogs Intel, it can inherit the x86 world at a blow, through virtualisation.

We're not saying it will, just that it might. But with the stakes so high, that may be good enough.

Go to section: Commandments of destruction: 1 to 5 Commandments of destruction: 6 to 10

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