Re: [Xen-users] Xen and VMWare

["Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2016-10-23 19:36, J. Eppler wrote:
> Hello,
>
> VMWare has two different hypervisors. The first one runs on top of the
> operating system Windows, Linux and Mac and is comparable to VirtualBox.
> VMWare uses different names on different operating system for this host
> based virtualization approach (VMWare Player, Fusion Workstation etc.)
>
> The second product is VMWare ESXi which is "bare-metal" or hardware
> based virtualization solution. VMWare sells various products based on
> that "bare-metal" virtualization approach ( VMWare vSphere, VMWare Server).
>
> Only VMWare ESXi and Xen are comparable since both are "bare-metal"
> hypervisors. The advantage of Xen is the small attack surface since Xen
> does not emulate any devices. However, hardware based virtual machines
> (HVM) need to have emulated generic devices and Xen relies on Qemu for
> that.
>
> VMWare ESXi has a larger attack surface, since, as far as I know, they
> include drivers and emulated devices in their hypervisor.
> (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6759218/?arnumber=6759218)
>
> However, it is not possible to say which one is more or less secure.
> Both Xen (Citirx) and VMWare working hard to make their hypervisors
> secure as possible.
>
> But I myself prefer Xen, because it is:
> 1. Open Source - I and everybody else can audit, verify, improve, modify
> the source code
I will comment that this does not on average improve on the security of 
the code.  Take a look at Heartbleed, or CVE-2016-5195 for examples of 
this.  It generally means that fixes happen faster once a bug is found, 
but not that bugs will be discovered any sooner.
> 2. It has a small attack surface and a micro architecture design
I too prefer Xen for both reasons you listed, as well as:
3. It's free.
4. It doesn't impose unnecessary restrictions on what peripheral 
hardware you can have on your VM host (ESXi gets very picky about NIC's 
and storage controllers).
5. I find the management tooling much easier to use (this is of course 
opinion, and I'm referring just to XL).
> best regards
>   J. Eppler
>
> On 10/23/2016 04:54 PM, Jason Long wrote:
> > Hello.
> > Why someone say that VMWare security is better than Xen? I use Xen and it is so 
> > cool but someone told Xen has security problem and one reason for low market is 
> > its security!!!! I guess Xen market is good and many companies like host 
> > providers and cloud use Xen.
> > Any idea?
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
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>
>
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