One of the pillars of virtualization is the VM isolation property that can protect the host layer from the VM, effectively. Although some possible attacks have been found, virtualization remains an interesting approach to improve the security of your infrastructure.

But the isolation property doesn't work for the network layer, which remains potentially weak from a security point of view, even though standard and distributed virtual switches have some specific security features. VMware NSX tries to provide better security with micro-segmentation.

A new trend is now also to protect VMs from the underlying infrastructure; for example, in the case of a public cloud service, consumers may have some concerns about the security and privacy of their data.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Tuning and hardening guidelines
• Working with encryption and securing VMs