Once used mostly for testing and research, virtual machines (VMs) are rapidly becoming a critical part of the infrastructure at many organizations. Now that VMware provides its Virtual Server product for free, moving to virtualization is a possibility for even the smallest organizations. However, along with the capabilities VM technology brings to your infrastructure, comes the responsibility to take extra steps to ensure that your virtual environment is secure. Here are 15 tips for securing VMware’s Virtual Server. Although these tips are specific to the VMware product, you could easily adapt these concepts to any virtualization product.
Virtualization Security Issues
VMware Server allows multiple users to remotely access VMs (i.e., the guest OSs) running on a single physical machine (i.e., the host machine).
Although securing a guest OS in a VM is essentially the same as securing a physical machine, there are some important additional considerations to keep in mind. Because guest VMs exist as files on a host system, an unauthorized person could copy them, which is equivalent to stealing physical machines. Even worse, this theft, unlike theft of a physical machine, could go completely undetected. . . .
