Virtualization Security

The book describes background material relevant to understanding virtualization (history, business drivers, mainframe roots, virtualization and paravirtualization, scope the contents to x86 environments). The security aspects of a virtualized environment are presented in the areas of network configuration, logical access controls and needed services. The above security topics are mapped to various capabilities of popular virtualization tools (VMWare, XenEnterprise and VirtualIron). Finally, the use of assessment tools (Ecora, Nessus, CIS, LSAT, the author's script) are discussed to evaluate the above security concepts to systems in place.