Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Virtualization and Security ?
From: randy marchany <marchany () VT EDU>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:45:58 -0500
You should never mix security levels of the virtual hosts. A while ago, a bean counter in the Fed govt thought they could save $$$ by having 1 piece of hardware running 2 VM systems - one for the classified net and the other for the unclassified net. Not a good idea.... 5-10 years ago, sysadmins were trained to not put all of your services on the same machine. You didn't put your www server, DB server and Email functions on the same machine because a security weakness on one of those services compromised the rest. While that's not necessarily the case with VM systems, you want to carefully separate functions. Maybe some thing like putting your WWW server VM images on one hardware platforrm, your DB server VM images on another hardware host, etc. would be a good strategy. -Randy On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:40 AM, HALL, NATHANIEL D. <halln () otc edu> wrote:
I am in a similar situation as Anand. I have one additional question to add. Do you mix systems of different security levels? For example, placing DMZ and internal systems on the same virtual infrastructure? -- Nathaniel Hall, GSEC GCFW GCIA GCIH GCFA Network Security System Administrator OTC Computer Networking Office: (417) 447-7535 From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Rappaport,Jason Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 6:37 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Virtualization and Security ? Anand - all of our core infrastructure is virtualized (web servers, database servers, license servers, etc). We went with VmWare and attended several Vmware User Group meetings before we went full steam with this project. VmWare does have a free version of its product VmWare server that is nearly identical to VI3 (at least the current version is); with the exception of performance. In regards to security, we have locked down and restricted all access to our virtualization server to on campus access only. The virtual machines that sit on top of VI3 are all secured using traditional methodologies (firewall, anti virus, anti spyware, etc.). Each virtual machine does daily backups to a NAS device that is replicated nightly. In the event of a DR scenario, we have a backup virtualization server (VmWare Server) that we can bring online and restore form the latest backups. We actually had to do this once when we patched VI3 and it corrupted the boot partition. I had the backup virtualization server started within minutes and it took me 90 minutes to restore from the latest backups on all VMs; the support contract is well worth it. I am actually working on a project to phase our VmWare server and go with Vmware ESXi, which is Vmware's free product that runs on bare metal; Vmware Server runs on top of Linux or Windows. I hope that helps. Thanks, Jay __________________________________ Jay Rappaport jasonrap () drexel edu 215.895.1680 office 215.895.6447 fax Systems Administrator Design & Imaging Studios Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design Drexel University http://drexel.edu/westphal ________________________________ From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Anand Malwade Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 5:12 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Virtualization and Security ? Folks, We are looking into Data Center Consolidation and plan to virtualize most of our servers. Now Virtualization can yield sigificant operational advantages, but also introduces among others network, security complexity and management challenges. My question to the forum is a) Is anyone fully virtualized ? If so was a Vendor hired to perform this function and are there any lessons learnt that i should be aware of with the deployment? b) Has anyone run into significant Security and Risk Issues. Thanks, Anand Anand Malwade Information Security Officer, Seton Hall University, Tel: 973 275 2209 malwadan () shu edu
Current thread:
- Virtualization and Security ? Anand Malwade (Nov 10)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Rappaport,Jason (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? randy marchany (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Joel Rosenblatt (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Youngquist, Jason R. (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Bradley, Stephen W. Mr. (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? HALL, NATHANIEL D. (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? randy marchany (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Eric Case (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Joel Rosenblatt (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? St Clair, Jim (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Robert Maxwell (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Joel Rosenblatt (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Mike Lococo (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Jeffrey I. Schiller (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Cheng, Wang (Nov 11)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Clifford Collins (Nov 25)
- Re: Virtualization and Security ? Alex (Nov 25)