Security is critical in a vSphere environment. Virtual machine (VM) architecture, access methods and management is much different from that for physical servers. Because VMs are encapsulated into a single file that resides on a shared data store, additional attack vectors need to be secured. Further, any change or operation in a virtual environment can have a ripple effect on other residing VMs because all share common infrastructure components. Consequently, having proper security access controls in place is paramount to protect hosts and their VMs.
Because they have multiple components, virtual environments are secured in layers. You can do much of the work to secure an environment through vCenter Server, which provides centralized authentication and authorization services at many different levels inside vSphere. VCenter Server features four main components:
- Privileges. A privilege enables or denies users access to perform actions in vSphere.
- Roles. A role is a set of privileges that can be assigned to a user or group.
- Users and groups. Users and groups are used in permissions to assign roles from Active Directory (AD) or local Windows users/groups.
- Permissions. A permission is assigned to an object in vSphere and is composed of users/groups and a role.
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I received an invite today to an upcoming webinar on Virtualization Security and Compliance that is being given by Reflex Systems. What peaked my interest in it was the speakers and topics, one of the speakers is Rob Randall from VMware who is their security guru and also happens to reside in my hometown of Denver. The other speaker is Mike Wronski, VP of Product Management for Reflex Systems. One of the topics is VMsafe which was been announced quite a while ago but very little actual information on it has been released. Here’s what will be discussed in the webinar:
- Leverage VMware’s VMsafe technology in vSphere 4 to achieve greater security in your virtual environment.
- Use segmentation through Trust Zones and classification to safeguard your virtual data center and manage virtual assets more efficiently.
- Add a level of security policy enforcement in your virtual environment by using vTrust dynamic policy enforcement technology.
- Go “beyond the virtual firewall” to apply best practices for specifying policies in a virtual infrastructure.
I’m guessing that Relfex will be showing off and talking about an upcoming product release that leverages the VMsafe API’s that are part of the upcoming vSphere release. Since very little information about VMsafe has been released I’ll be interested to see how the product utilizes VMsafe to better integrate into ESX. The webinar is Wednesday, May. 27th at 2:00pm EST, you can register for it here.
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