September 12th, 2009 by s3ctrzr0

VMware white-papers is my primary source of information. Almost every single one of them contains valuable information. VMware  just released a brand new white paper titled “Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server” which is most definitely worth reading.

Download:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf-vsphere-memory_management.pdf

Description: VMware® ESX™ is a hypervisor designed to efficiently manage hardware resources including CPU, memory, storage, and network among multiple concurrent virtual machines. This paper describes the basic memory management concepts in ESX, the configuration options available, and provides results to show the performance impact of these options.

September 8th, 2009 by s3ctrzr0

During my second day in Black Hat I did get to meet up with Syngress while they were passing out a prologue of Jason E Street and Kent Nabors new Hacker Fiction book “Dissecting the Hack”.

This prologue was one heck of a fictional ride! I can see both Hackers and Infosec professionals gripping on this fictional story, like half of the book is going to be Infosec case studies and the other half a technical manual.

As our industry matures more and more we can relate on the security threats in this book and definitely will give all its readers a better view of how to piece them together, including how-to defend against them.

The book will be published and available in October so if you like to learn to recon, scan, explore, exploit and expunge with the tools and techniques based on its fictional story, please visit your nearest bookstore and purchase this book.

Thanks to Jason and Kent for bringing a new light in Information Security how-to manuals with a fictional twist.

September 1st, 2009 by bl4ckc4t

This year I was unable to attend VMWorld 2009, but fortunately the Opening keynote by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware was made available as a Webcast on VMWorld.com.

In the keynote Paul took the audience through a Virtualization Journey, basically the product road map of VMware. Paul started by opening up with the evolution or revolution of virtualization and what the new release of vSphere will have in relations to both internal and external cloud computing.

The product line that VMware is offering is definitely maturing, which covers the full realm of IT from process to infrastructure. The virtualization technology has definitely made its place in the industry by shifting the culture of how administrators and engineers adapt in the data center; from the days of keeping the performance maintained below a 20% utilization of the CPU resource, to fully enabling the capability of the hardware and utilizing the resources more efficiently through virtualization.

Paul spoke briefing about the vCloud initiative, which involved a number service provider to participate. This allowed the moving motion forward to expand on cloud computing and the introduction of vExpress, an online self service sign up and registration to deploy a server in the cloud for your use at a low monthly cost. These concepts are becoming more and more popular in the industry for the ease of provisioning and avoid the need to go through a purchasing process of hardware.

The keynote provided a good outlook on what to look forward to in the near future and the additional capabilities that VMware will be introducing. To view the full keynote and to get more on the other products Paul spoke about, visit the link and register at VMWorld General Sessions