VMTN Blog

VMware's own Mike DiPetrillo surveys the current state of patching virtualization platforms and it's not pretty. Link: VMware Patch Tuesday from Mike's blog A Little Truth.

Microsoft’s new hypervisor based product called “Hyper-V” requires a Windows operating system in the Parent Partition. Given that you’ll need to patch that Windows OS just like any other Windows OS I decided to look at the history of Microsoft patches for Windows Server 2003. ...

Virtual Iron actually uses the Xen open-source hypervisor. There are a lot of other vendors out there that use that same hypervisor (Red Hat, SUSE, SUN, Citrix/XenSource, and Oracle to name a few). While the hypervisor itself is pretty good the architecture still requires a general purpose operating system in Domain 0 (the Parent Partition in Microsoft land). What does this mean? Well, you’re back to having to patch a general purpose Linux operating system which introduces downtime for you system. ...

Last, we’ll go into a totally different architecture for the last vendor - Virtuozzo. ... you to install the patch once on the host and everyone inherits it. Guess what? It works! ... Let’s say you deploy that patch and it blows up one of the VMs on the host. If you’ve never had a patch blow up something in your environment then I want to meet you. Anyhow, something blew up so we’ll need to back that patch out. Oh wait...all of the other VMs are inheriting that same patch. ...

Mike isn't shy about sharing from his long experience in virtualization, and in my experience he knows what he's talking about. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike. I hope we see more of you around here.