Understanding Hyper-V's architecture

Before you can address the security of your Hyper-V host, it's important to have a basic comprehension of Hyper-V architecture. Without this, it's difficult to understand how various security measures will affect the components of your deployment.

The most important thing to understand is that, for the most part, the hypervisor is independent of the management operating system. Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, which means that it is not an application or an operating system component. The hypervisor has direct control over the hardware it is installed on. It manages a number of partitions, which contain the virtual machines. One of these partitions, known as parent partition, is where the management operating system runs. The parent partition is the only partition that is allowed to communicate directly with the hypervisor. In Hyper-V, the parent partition provides the hardware drivers used by the hypervisor. To some extent, the parent...