Serious Vulnerability To Virtualized Servers Discovered In Xen Project

The Xen Project has revealed last month a lot of details on a serious vulnerability in the Xen hypervisor, one that could put the security of a lot of virtualized servers at risk. Xen is a free, open-source hypervisor that is used to create and run virtual machines and is widely used by providers of cloud computing and virtual private server hosting companies.

The security vulnerability forced Amazon Web Services and Rackspace to reboot some of their customer's virtualized servers when it was discovered. Amazon and Rackspace were among some of the major cloud providers that Xen disclosed the vulnerability to, which is being tracked as CVE-2014-7188.

Do you have a server migration project? Get a server rental fast.

This vulnerability allows a virtual machine created using Xen's hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) to read data that is stored by other HVM guests sharing the same physical hardware. This vulnerability breaks a crucial security barrier in multi-tenant virtual environments. A malicious HVM guest could exploit the vulnerability to crash the host server, according to a security advisory published by the Xen Project.

The vulnerability only affects Xen running on x86 systems and does not affect ARM or servers virtualized with Xen's paravirtualization (PV) mode instead of HVM. Regardless, the issue is likely to affect a very large number of servers. Amazon was forced to reboot nearly 10% of its Elastic Cloud Computer (EC2) servers and a similar effort from Rackspace affected a quarter of its 200,000 customers.

Amazon scheduled a zone by zone reboot so that they didn't affect two regions or availability zones at the same time. According to a statement released by the company, "The zone by zone reboots were completed as planned and we worked very closely with our customers to ensure that the reboots went smoothly for them."

Rackspace was not as fortunate as Amazon in its process to fix the issue. Taylor Rhodes, CEO of Rackspace, sent out an email to customers about the vulnerability and Rackspace's efforts to correct it and in it stated that the company "dropped a few balls" in the process. "Some of our reboots, for example, took much longer than they should and some of our notifications were not as clear as they should have been. We are making changes to address those mistakes," Rhodes stated.

The problems with this seem to have been fixed but you can be sure that the Xen Project is still working on making sure that something like this doesn't happen again.

Amazon's Cloud Powered by Estimated 454,400 Servers

Ever wonder what it takes to run a cloud operation? What kind of infrastructure is needed and what kind of hardware is used? Probably not because most typical users never really get a chance to see the entire infrastructure that supports the plethora of services they use on something like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. However, it was recently estimated by by Huan Liu, Research Manager for Accenture, that an astonishing 454,000 individual blade servers are currently being used to power it.

Liu made the estimate in a personal blog post recently, stating that he used a combination of data and DNS queries within EC2, all of which were publicly available, to come up with that number. The number indicates just how many physical server racks are used by Amazon's Cloud Service multiplied by the number of individual servers that could be housed in each rack.

However, Liu did mention that there are a number of different obvious holes in his number. Liu notes that the total number he gave is a complete estimation on his part and that Amazon could very well configure its systems differently than he thinks. In addition to that, if Amazon has any racks without an active server running on it then it would be impossible to count, which would also displace Liu's accuracy in the total.

Regardless, Liu's post has stirred up quite the buzz in the media, though that could be because it is one of the best estimates to Amazon's cloud size currently on the web. Amazon is pretty secretive with their information on their Elastic Compute Cloud, making these hypotheses a necessity.

Source: PC World - Nearly a Half Million Servers May Power Amazon Cloud

Renting projectors for meetings, events, trade shows, and projectors is easy at Rentourprojectors.com! You can rent projectors by the day, week, or month!

Amazon Makes an Apology for Server Outage, Offers Credit as Compensation

Amazon.com has released an apology today for a data-center outage that brought down a bunch of major websites including Foursquare as well as Reddit. In addition to the apology, Amazon.com also offered customers of its Web services a 10-day credit.

Amazon isn't, however, disclosing how much the credit will be. Amazon Web Services accounts for only a small percentage of Amazon's total revenue. However ,the company does have high hopes for the business. The Web service rents out computer time by the hour.

The outage took place at a data center near Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. and was a major stumble for Amazon's service. The company is still trying to restore some of the computers brought down in the incident which started eight days ago.

In a post-mortem report that was released today, Amazon, which is based out of Seattle, stated that human error set off the outage. An automated error-recovery mechanism then went out of control causing many computers to become stuck in recovery mode.

Amazon set up the service in a way to provide redundancy by letting computers in a different zone of availability take over if another one fails. Amazon stated that customers who were set up properly to run their computing tasks over multiple zones were largely unaffected, however, that error made it difficult to switch zones on a whim. It is, however, making changes to prevent that error from recurring.

The 10-day credit applies to each and every customer using the zone that went down, despite whether they were directly affected or not. Amazon has also not revealed exactly how many customers were affected.

Source: Associated Press - Amazon apologizes for server outage

File Server rentals are ideal if your company needs an extra storage unit for company information while you are testing various types of storage solutions.

Whether you need a short-term rental or a long-term lease, we have the right kind of server for your needs.