On state of the art in virtual machine security

Data centers and computing service providers are striving to improve the utilization of their computing resources. This is primarily due to the need of resources to be more economical and power efficient. Virtualization is one of the concepts that provide flexibility to host multiple operating system stacks on a single hardware. By effectively partitioning the computing resources, it reduces the total number of physical servers and consolidates several services on a single physical rack. Each virtual machine behaves like an independent machine (may be duplicate of the original one) while the scheduling of hardware resources among different virtual machines is performed with the help of a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). Proliferation of virtual machines in the enterprise architecture creates need for identification of potential security risks as well as appropriate solutions for the identified risks to ensure the integrity of the underlying applications hosted at the virtual machines. This paper describes available virtualization technologies, corresponding security vulnerabilities, and available solutions.