Virtualization

What are the main security threats that should be considered with virtualization?

I was looking at either OkayFreedom or Hotspot Shield Elite for a VPN service. Does anyone have experience with them, and if so, which VPN service would you recommend?

We are looking at both Hyper-V and VMware as a virtualization platform for my company, and I would like to know how much difference people have experienced between the two. Are there significant differences in ease of implementation, cost, scalability, security, etc.? Is there any compelling reason to choose one over the other?

I was asked this morning how to perform host maintenance on Hyper-V and my less than brillinat answer was, "Hmmm, I'm not sure." Does anyone know how to go about host maintenance using Hyper-V Manager?

How do you monitor performance and capacity in a virtual environment? I don't want to make educated guesses, and need to be able to demonstrate what we are getting for our virtualization investment in a comprehensive manner. What tools are available to make this task easier?

The shared infrastucture of a virtual environment makes it a lot harder for me to plan capacity for than it is with a traditional server environment. The idea of virtualization is to efficiently use all of your resources, and this central concept is defeated if resources are unbalanced on a host.

Virtualization makes some things easier in life, but introduces new security issues as well. VMs can be in any location, and out of sight can mean out of control. It was easier when you could walk across an office and lay hands on an individual stationary machine.

Implementing virtualization has not gone as I expected. Frankly it has been a serious drain of time and resources as we move forward with it. I hope the virtualized environment that will eventually be fully in place will be well worth the effort.

We have one guy assigned to check the function/reliability of new applications when accessed by users on different operating systems. I would like for him to use one machine to do the testing, don't want to spend significant money, and want the testing to be done fairly quickly.

Virtualization is great for traditional application servers, since if a cpu is idle for one application, then others can utilize the available power. But what about database servers? We have to maintain similar storage for development, QA/testing, and production.

How committed is Oracle to keeping VirtualBox running? Does it fit into their long-term strategies?