I'm sorry for my bad english.
There is a application with license tied to the hardware. One computer - one license.
Typically, a license check is as follows:
The application scans hardware.
The application collects information about the hardware and prepares a request for the license availability.
The application sends a request to check the availability of the license.
The license server receives the request and returns a response. The application receives a response from the license server and activates full functionality.
However, if the application is on the virtual machine - gathering information about the hardware fails.
I could not get information about the server hardware, as default methods do not permit do it.
Appeal to the hypervisor methods allows you to collect some statistics, but it is not enough to generate a request for the presence of licenses.
Thus there are 2 questions:
How within the virtual machine, I can get information about the
server hardware?
How can I implement verification of the license tied to hardware, if
the program is running on a virtual machine?
Thank you!
The guest OS and the hypervisor can communicate with each other through the VMware vSockets.
Related
What's the difference between process virtual machine with system virtual machine?
My guess is that process VM is not providing a kind of an operating system for the whole application for that OS, rather providing an environment for some specific application.
And system VM is providing an environment for an OS to be installed just like VirtualBox.
Am I getting it correct?
Another question is the difference between the two different implementation of system VM: hosted vs. stand-alone.
I'm a beginner studying OS, so easy and understandable answer would be greatly appreciated :)
A Process virtual machine, sometimes called an application virtual machine, runs as a normal application inside a host OS and supports a single process. It is created when that process is started and destroyed when it exits. Its purpose is to provide a platform-independent programming environment that abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system, and allows a program to execute in the same way on any platform.
A System virtual machine provides a complete system platform which supports the execution of a complete operating system (OS),Just like you said VirtualBox is one example.
A Host virtual machine is the server component of a virtual machine , which provides computing resources in the underlying hardware to support guest virtual machine (guest VM).
The following is from http://airccse.org/journal/jcsit/5113ijcsit11.pdf :
System Virtual Machines
A System Virtual Machine gives a complete virtual hardware platform with support for execution
of a complete operating system (OS).
The advantage of using System VM are:
Multiple Operating System environments can run in parallel on the same piece of
hardware in strong isolation from each other.
The VM can provide an instruction set architecture (ISA) that is slightly different from
that of the real machine
The main draw backs are:
Since the VM indirectly accesses the same hardware the efficiency is compromised.
Multiply VMs running in parallel on the same physical machine may result in varied
performance depending on the workload imposed on the system. Implementing proper
isolation techniques may address this drawback.
I'm looking for a platform with Web UI access that allows me to do the following:
Maintain a list of computers and add / remove based on their IP address.
Provide the SSH information for each computer machine.
Monitor if the machines are up ( ping ? )
Restart the machines with a web UI using the ssh information on the backend of the application.
I'm close to start making such an app myself since I can't seem to find anything close to that in the internet. Any clues if such an application exists ?
You might want to take a look at MeshCentral: https://meshcentral.com/ - you can add systems that you are managing and do some remote operations.
http://info.meshcentral.com/: Meshcentral is open source and is both a peer-to-peer technology with a wide array of uses and web service that is targeted for remote monitoring and management of computers and devices. Users can manage all their devices from a single web site, no matter the location of the computers or if they are behind routers or proxies.
If you are looking for source code you could take a look at the "Open Manageabilty Developer's Toolkit" http://opentools.homeip.net/open-manageability. This tool was built for managing systems with Intel Active Management Technology, but it does a lot of what you are looking for. You can download the source and see if you can use any of it if you decide to write your own UI.
Lets say I am running Windows 7 with two major processes I will call V and P.
V is a virtual machine running another instance of Windows 7, while P is the process that I want information about and both are on the 'top-level' operating system.
Can a process, C, which is being run by the Windows 7 inside V, get information about processes such as P from within V? In other words, can a process being run inside a virtual machine get any information about processes being run by the operating system which is also maintaining the virtual machine process? I feel like it would rely on the ability of the virtual machine process, if it is not programmed to specifically retrieve such information then it will not be possible.
I have read another topic about the difficulty of even detecting whether a process is being run by a virtual machine or not. Some feel it is not reliable or possible. I am not sure that there is a standard way to find this out yet, I believe the post was roughly 4 or 5 years ago.
So can this be done by process C, or will there need to be more standard routines to accomplish this task?
I don't believe it's possible for an operating system running under a virtual machine manager (e.g. (VMWare et al) to directly access information relating to the host operating system because by default most virtual machine managers attempt to fully isolate the host and guest systems.
That being said most virtual machine managers have mechanisms which allow the virtual machine to share data and communicate with the host system. By using these mechanisms it is possible for the host operating system to convey information about itself to the guest.
Option 1: A shared file
With shared networking between the host and the guest it would be possible to have the host system write the information to a file in the shared location and have the guest open and parse this file using CreateFile and a UNC path e.g. \\host\sharename\file.txt
Option 2: Data transfer via a socket or named pipe
Shared networking between the host and the guest would allow you to use the Windows Sockets or Named Pipe APIs to create TCP or UDP sockets, or a named pipe through which data can be exchanged.
This approach would involve a server application running on the host application, which writes the process information you're after to the socket or pipe, where it can be read by the guest system which runs a client process.
Option 3: Remote Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Query
WMI provides a standard means of getting information and interacting with many aspects of the windows operating system including information about processes.
This is probably the most complex option because by default WMI does not accept queries from remote hosts (ie. your VM), so the host machine would need to be configured to allow remote WMI queries.
Once configured WMI is easily usable via the WMI command line client (wmic.exe) so you could invoke it with a query like this:
In this example:
%HOST_NAME% Is the name of the system hosting your Windows 7 VM
%TARGET_PROCESS% is the process name of the process you want
information about
wmi \node:%HOST_NAME% process where name='%TargetProcess%' get executablepath
This particular query gets the executable path of %TargetProcess% but there are many more properties available as per the documentation for the Win32_Process WMI Class documentation1.
Option 4: Shared clipboard
Some virtual machine managers allow the guest system to access the host's clipboard so information can be exchanged between applications running on the guest and host.
I appreciate it's probably the least conventional option but you could conceivably use the Windows Clipboard API to write the process info to the host's clipboard, and then read the information into a process on the guest system.
1NB:Although the Win32_Process class documentation lists properties in title case (ExecutablePath) I found they only worked properly in a wmic query when written in all lower case (executablepath)
We're currently writing some software that we want to protect. We thought that registering a user's MAC address in a database upon activation of the software seemed viable; we can profile and grab that with a Java applet, (is there a better way?) so getting it isn't too much of a problem. However, we want their computer to only run the application, and download application files/updates from the server when their MAC address has been verified with their one on-file. We understand that this means a lockdown to one computer, but special changes can be made on request.
What would be the best way to verify their MAC address, to see if it exists in the database, and then serve them the files to run the application? (And to simply run it on subsequent requests, to prevent re-downloading.)
As the comments to the question indicate: no, you cannot use a MAC address effectively for Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Azure and EC2 are optimized for running servers. Lots and lots of servers. Both platforms attempt to manage tons of things for you -- in Azure's case, it wants to manage even the target operating system.
However, I'd like to use such a service for a different reason: Testing.
I've got a ton of operating systems I need to support. My tests don't actually take that long, but running them on every platform is time consuming. I was going to just use a cloud service for this, thinking that these machines would be running for much less than an hour, and it wouldn't cost all that much.
The problem is that the major cloud services won't run client versions of Windows -- Windows Server only.
Is there a cloud service which would let me run every client and server version, and every service pack level, of Windows released starting with Windows 2000 SP4 to the present day?
Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions.
Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good.
https://www.cloudsigma.com/
There is also a free trail on at the moment
https://cs.cloudsigma.com/accounts/signup/
The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you.
A search on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma):
ElasticHosts
stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one)
Sublime IP
No, commercial cloud services like Azure and Amazon EC2 are themselves virtual, so you don't get a great deal of control over the operating system.
An option may be to consider renting a full physical server (colocated, or managed) and then use a battery of virtual machines to run the tests. Something like VMWare's snapshot feature sounds perfect: spin up a clean virtual machine, deploy the test code, then throw away changes to the disk once the tests have been completed.
Or, indeed, as #Stuart suggests - run the tests locally.
This definitely isn't something Azure offers - I think all of Azure's images are based near to Windows Server 2008 R2.
For EC2 you could set up images for Server 2003 through to 2008R2 - but nothing else. There are also some services out there to assist with this - e.g. VaasNet http://www.vaasnet.com/catalog
For testing the other Windows operating systems, I simply don't think there's a cloud service available to let you do this. I don't even think there are any cloud services where you can run "Virtual PC" type applications on top of the hosted operating system - as I think most of the virtualization APIs are disabled in the cloud environments (virtualization within virtualization not supported!)
Sorry to say this, but your best bet may be local test hardware running VirtualPC images.
It appears that the Xen Cloud Platform might do what you're after. This page ends with:
Guest Operating Systems: the XCP binary distribution is delivered with a wide range of Linux and Widnows guests. Check out the release notes for a complete list.
And their PDF document Xen Cloud Platform Virtual Machine Installation Guide (Release 0.1, Published October 2009) says that Windows 2000 Server has "No known issues."
(I don't have any affiliation with Xen)
In conjunction with the above, there is also a list of Xen VirtualPrivateServerProviders, several of which say they include Windows.
Buy time on an EC2 instance and use it to host VirtualBox VMs with VMs set up for each operating system you want to test for. Use a RDP client or VNC or some other means to control the guest OS. This forum post seems to point to that being possible. But yes it is not a cloud service itself and you would have todo some initial setup and configuration work yourself.