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Sum Of All Virtual Fears: Page 4 of 10

Meanwhile, XenEnterprise's upcoming 4.0 hypervisor will weigh in at a trim 60,000 or so lines of code, says Simon Crosby, XenSource's CTO. Less code equals fewer potential bugs. Moreover, XenSource, which was recently acquired by Citrix, uses IBM's secure hypervisor technology, and XenEnterprise has endured the pokes and prods of the open-source community, earning a Common Criteria Level 5 rating.

Chip designers and VM software vendors are also working to stay on top of the security struggle. Steve Grobman, Intel's Director of Business-Client architecture, says Intel VT-X server and desktop virtualization offerings are designed from the ground up to strengthen security. For example, Intel's current VT-enhanced server chipsets offer three new layers of code privilege for virtualization on top of the traditional three layers of CPU code privilege.

Of course, VMware currently owns the enterprise virtualization market, and the company is feeling pretty secure.

"Design, testing and implementation of VMware ESX server contrasts with traditional, larger-platform operating systems," says Mendel Rosenblum, VMware co-founder and chief scientist. "VMware has been focused on security concerns from our first line of code. I am 100 percent confident that we will not have a hypervisor compromise due to a design flaw."

We certainly hope his certitude proves warranted, and indeed, vendors have been successful thus far.