Abstract
This essay seeks to establish the security of virtualized servers compared to the physical servers. The paper determines the value of virtualization in the computer architecture of today’s world which is designed to run on a single operating system and therefore, most of the computer resources are left underutilized. The focus would be to determine whether the virtualized servers are more secure than their physical counterparts giving the advantages of virtualization therein. Virtual servers over physical servers
Virtualization entails the obstruction of physical resources away from their underlying logical resources to improve flexibility and agility, reduce costs and therefore, improve the value of the organization. In a virtualized context, computing environments can be dynamically expanded, created, moved or shrunk as demand varies. Server Virtualization entails allocating several occasions of an operation system to run simultaneously on a single server. Virtualization of servers is achieved by applying a hypervisor to allocate logically and separate physical computer resources. The hypervisor enables a guest operating system to function as if it were solely in control of the hardware while running on the virtual machine, oblivious that other guests are sharing it (Bakshi & Yogesh, 2010).
The security benefits of virtualized servers over physical servers
Virtualization of servers in the current world is surrounded by a very sophisticated management infrastructure that enables the user to spin up, store, and run virtual machines: the benefits that accrue to the users of virtualized servers over physical servers include, but not limited to:
Intrusion detection The virtual server on investigating the security issues concerned conducts emergency response to the risk by recognizing the source IP addresses concerned with the attack then automatically creates the access lists that would crash all the data packets originating from that IP address. The virtual server then reacts to the attack by moving the targeted applications to virtual machines located in another database. Router automation would instantly redirect operational network links to the new location. Therefore, the firewall located at the new server will prevent all the IP addresses that the attacker applied, and if any an authentic user(s) is trying to connect to the server, they will be re-routed to the new server (Vermasan et al., 2009). The correct approach involves labeling packets with the proper virtual machine identifier and integrating the proper filters in the networking pile to guarantee only the right virtual machine can receive them.
Enhanced Remote Management
Remote Management capabilities enable the user to manage a machine from a remote location completely. The user can address what would have normally been an on-site visit through a remote console, with network troubleshooting, resource upgrades, power on/off operations e.t.c. This can significantly enhance the effectiveness of server management while cutting downtime and travel costs.
Process Filtering Virtual Server enables process filtering to conceal all processes outside a virtual machine’s range and prevents any unnecessary interaction between a process inside a virtual machine with another outside the virtual machine. This separation requires the addition of some existing core data structures for them to become aware to which virtual machine they belong (Soltesz, 2007).
Ease of Migration The users can move their workload of virtual machines to a special location if some disaster occurs at the original site. If some users have multiple datacenters, then they can switch the virtual machines to datacenters that are located close to customer’s location to improve user experience and performance.
The Chroot Barrier
The virtual server uses a unique file feature, known as the Chroot Barrier, on the parent index of each virtual machine to stop unauthorized modification and escape from the chroot confinement (Soltesz, 2007). Recovery of organizations processes in case of system failure. If a virtual server is corrupted or hardware fails, reconstructing the environment from a stored virtual image is an easy and immediate way to reinstate services. Also, because the hardware is distracted from the virtual machine, a vital server can be recovered on a hardware platform dissimilar from the normal production structure, without the risk of incompatibilities.
Improved troubleshooting and monitoring Most virtual servers allow the users of all physical hosts through a central hub where the user can easily contrast resource usage and view a history of events and tasks. The user can easily make comparisons between virtual and physical servers and perform detailed analysis and troubleshooting. Since the hardware is distracted from the user, their workloads can be transferred to different location without the user’s knowing about it. This way, faulty hardware can be fixed without any downtime in user’s services (Verma, 2014).
Integrity of data and software To inspect or modify another virtual machine’s software or data, the user would need to have access to either physical memory or registers. Because cores are not mutual and since there is no hypervisor that runs during the whole life span of the virtual machine, there is no probable way to obtain the registers. Violations in memory access are also mitigated (Keller et al., 2010).
Virtual Server implementation via standard images. When a virtual server is formed, with suitable patches applied, baseline security settings, and other environment-specific settings, an enterprise can save an image. The image can be used to create other servers of the same type or for recovery.
Conclusion
Virtualization has added high security, stability, ease of access, and high availability to calculate resources while reducing cost involved. Owing to the expansion of hardware and software to sustain virtualization, the benefits and access of it have increased diversely. The main problem is that current security tools are not designed with virtualization in mind as the strategy always overlooks security issues. Therefore, it is important to protect a virtual machine form another virtual machine that may reside on the same physical server by use of security software and enhanced hypervisor as a specialized security virtual machine. References
Bakshi, A., & Yogesh, B. (2010). Securing cloud from DDOS Attacks using Intrusion Detection System in virtual machine. Pp3.
Keller, E., Szefer, J., Rexford, J., Lee, R.(2010). NoHype: Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure without the Virtualization. Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture. ISCA ‘10Pages 350-361 New York, NY, USA ©2010
Soltesz, S., Pötzl, H., Fiuczynski, M., Bavier, A.,& Peterson, L. (2007). Container-based Operating System Virtualization: A Scalable, High-performance Alternative to Hypervisors. Pp 279.
Verma, R. (2014). Virtualization and the Computer Architecture.pp1.
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