Virtualisation and security risk

[Triple-X]

Hello,
I have running small network at my work place. It's running good. want to know about Virtualisation. What is that ? Is it helpful to monitor a network. What are the security risk involved in that? Any suggestion?

[Steve123]

Virtualization is software that uses a physical resource like a server and divides it into virtual resources called virtual machines (VM). Virtualization gives accessibility to users to consolidate physical resources, simplify deployment and administration and reduce power and cooling requirements. While virtualization technology is most popular in the server world, virtualization technology is also used in data storage such as storage networking, and within operating systems such as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.following are the benefits of virtualization * Server Consolidation
* Reduced power and cooling
* Green Computing
* Ease of deployment and administration
* High availability and disaster recovery
use different tools in the physical world that the virtual world compounds the problem. "
Given the challenges that must be addressed to realize the benefits of server virtualization, a new approach is needed, a cross-platform solution that can guarantee both virtual and physical. Cross-platform tools for virtual security can help organizations enforce security policies through dynamic datacenters and eliminate trade-offs between the benefits of virtualization and maintaining strong security.

[Shen]

Virtualisation Increasing the manageability, security and flexibility in IT environments, technologies such as hardware-assisted virtualization.Intel ® Virtualization Technology software-based on virtualization solutions gives the maximum utilization of system by creating multiple environments into a single server or PC. Disregarding the software away from the underlying hardware, a world of new usage models open to cut costs, increase management efficiency, enhance security, while making your infrastructure more robust in the case of disaster.Cross a platform virtual security places physical machines and virtual machines in areas of logical security and protects against VM sprawl by ensuring rogue VM are not members and can not communicate with the security zones in which they are not a member. In fact, they do not even see. By strictly controlling access to each area, the attack surface for virtual machines compromised is greatly reduced.
The cross-platform approach is typically based on a distribution, peer-to-peer, which allows the architecture scalability to hundreds of thousands of cases. Policy management is completed en masse, update some or all of policies endpoint with just a few mouse clicks.

[Big Fish]

virtualisation increases operational efficiencies and management flexibility, and reduces total cost of ownership, it can also increase security risks.
According to Gartner, 60 per cent of virtual machines (VM) will be less secure than their physical counterparts through 2009. The security challenges includeependence of IP: In a virtualized environment, IP addresses often change as VMS are created, retired or have migrated from one physical host to another, causing problems in the traditional protection mechanisms.
Virtual Machine Sprawl: VMs are easily created from existing images, often showing a large number of virtual machines that are not properly maintained or are based on images with known vulnerabilities. Successful attacks on VMS vulnerable may serve as a launching pad to attack other virtual machines.
The inability to monitor the intra-host: Server virtualization introduces the concept of a switch "soft" to allow VMs to communicate with each other in a single host. Special tools are needed to monitor and protect these communications, and options are limited.use different tools in the physical world that the virtual world compounds the problem. "
Given the challenges that must be addressed to realize the benefits of server virtualization, a new approach is needed, a cross-platform solution that can guarantee both virtual and physical. Cross-platform tools for virtual security can help organizations enforce security policies through dynamic datacenters and eliminate trade-offs between the benefits of virtualization and maintaining strong security.