Missed the point in a big way [LWN.net]

Missed the point in a big way

Posted Jan 12, 2006 13:37 UTC (Thu) by bfeeney (guest, #6855)
Parent article: Testing out the Xen live CD

The big draw of Xen is not in easing or refining development, it's in enhancing security. In a way it's like an extreme verison of a hyper-visor.

In other words, each individual server runs in it's own little virtual box, and cannot damage the integrity of the rest of the system, through either fault or attack. This is why RedHat and Solaris are so into virtualisation right now, it's the next big thing in securing servers.

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exactly

Posted Jan 21, 2006 13:03 UTC (Sat) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

That's exactly what I have in mind for securing our company's webserver. Our problem is, that we have exactly one server for many different services and much old code running there where no one knows about the security risks.

So I thought about using Xen to let every service run on it's own virtual machine and using destination NAT and apache proxying (for splitting our PHP scripts and the frontpage stuff one customer needs) to bring them together on one external IP.

So when the catastrophy finally comes it's only one service that's going down instead of everything.