Everything You Need to Know About Hyper-V Security
It's an incredibly useful capability, allowing organizations to consolidate servers, operate cheaper and more effective environments, simplify disaster recovery, and more. But what about security? As Windows IT Pro's Jan De Clercq explains, "securing virtual servers is different from the way you secure physical servers." In Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Security, De Clercq looks at the tool's security features, walks you through protecting the parent partition, explains how to patch VMs, and discusses ensuring high availability of your virtualization servers. Here's an excerpt from the section on Hyper-V's architectural defenses: When Hyper-V loads, it creates a thin abstraction layer (less than 1MB) called the hypervisor. It operates between the physical server hardware and the host OS. The hypervisor interfaces directly with the server hardware and loads before the host OS starts. You could also define the hypervisor as a mini OS that allows for the virtualization of other OSs on top of it. All OSs that run on a Hyper-V server (both the virtualized ones and the host OS) always run inside a virtual machine (VM) that's under the watchful eye of the hypervisor. Virtual Server uses a different approach in which the host OS runs beside the virtualization layer, and the host OS also directly interfaces with the hardware. If you're an IT manager or admin working with Hyper-V (or planning to), this article should help answer a lot of your questions about Microsoft's virtualization tool. In the meantime, check out these related posts: |
In recent months we've talked a lot about Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008 tool that allows you to run virtual "guest computer" environments on a single host computer.
