> Tim, I'm surprised at you. No software is invincible. It's only a matter of > time until someone finds some odd combination of machine instructions > running in the guest OS (or something) that will exploit a vulnerability in > the VMware virtual machine software itself. (Then again, the exploit may be > done in a way that I can't even imagine. Who knows?) Sure, the VMware > development team is smart, but they aren't that smart! > > The question is: Does running something like VMware expose you to more risk > in the long-run or less?
I don't think there's a simple answer to that. Running virtual machines might increase the effect of a hardware failure in the host machine. (except the host machine should be of higher quality with more redundancy than if you had 50 seperate servers) If the host machine is directly compromised then you lose all the client vm's. As to the closed source / open source issue, there are open source options like user-mode-linux, bochs.. A short review link http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1054&page=1
