New Xen vuln triggers Amazon, Rackspace reboot panic redux

Newly discovered vulnerabilities in the open source Xen virtualization hypervisor have once again sent major public cloud companies scurrying to patch and reboot their systems before attackers can pull off a massive exploit. Amazon and Rackspace have both announced that they will need to reboot some of their servers to address …

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure about this pre-notify system... basically if you're not big enough to qualify, then you are at a competitive disadvantage to the big guys as their exposure risk is less than yours.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS

Don't these people use live migration? Surely they can afford a SAN or two to get shared storage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: FFS

> Surely they can afford a SAN or two to get shared storage.

In order for the whole hyped-up business model of selling what has been around since the dark ages (shared hosting) as some mythical fancy new cloudy goodness they have to keep their costs low.

As a result they have to use fancy cutting-edge abstracted software based storage mechanisms instead of the tried and tested SAN mechanisms that any sane IT manager would opt for !

You get what you pay for.

[Mad Chaz]

"Microsoft, for example, uses a homegrown hypervisor for its Azure cloud."

Microsoft doesn't do planned reboots anyway. It just falls over without warning and they wonder what happened.

[RIBrsiq]

So a vulnerability in Xen -- an excellent FOSS -- causes massive panic, reboots and disruption of service and by the fourth comment, we are getting snide remarks on the quality of *Microsoft* software...?

Most fascinating, indeed!