Book Image

VMware vCloud Security

Book Image

VMware vCloud Security

Overview of this book

Security is a major concern, in particular now that everything is moving to the cloud. A private cloud is a cloud computing platform built on your own hardware and software. The alternative is to deploy the services you need on a public cloud infrastructure provided by an external supplier such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, or HP Public Cloud. While a public cloud can afford greater flexibility, a private cloud gives you the advantage of greater control over the entire stack. "VMware vCloud Security" focuses on some critical security risks, such as the application level firewall and firewall zone, virus and malware attacks on cloud virtual machines, and data security compliance on any VMware vCloud-based private cloud. Security administrators sometimes deploy its components incorrectly, or sometimes cannot see the broader picture and where the vCloud security products fit in. This book is focused on solving those problems using VMware vCloud and the vCloud Networking and Security product suite, which includes vCloud Networking and Security App, vShield Endpoint, and vCloud Networking and Security Data Security. Ensuring the security and compliance of any applications, especially those that are business critical, is a crucial step in your journey to the cloud. You will be introduced to security roles in VMware vCloud Director, integration of LDAP Servers with vCloud, and security hardening of vCloud Director. We'll then walk through a hypervisor-based firewall that protects applications in the virtual datacenter from network-based attacks. We'll create access control policies based on logical constructs such as VMware vCenter Server containers and VMware vCloud Networking and Security security groups but not just physical constructs, such as IP addresses. You'll learn about the architecture of EPSEC and how to implement it. Finally, we will understand how to define data security policies, run scans, and analyze results.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
VMware vCloud Security
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

vCloud Networking and Security Data Security architecture


The vCloud Networking and Security Data Security architecture has been defined in the following figure, where you will find similarities with the architecture of other solutions that work with vShield Endpoint, which we described in the previous chapter.

You cannot deploy vCloud Networking and Security Data Security unless you install vShield Endpoint for each ESXi host on your vSphere Datacenter. Once you install vShield Endpoint, you can use VMware vCloud Networking and Security Manager to deploy a vCloud Networking and Security Data Security virtual appliance on each ESXi host. The virtual appliance is based on the EPSEC framework, so it includes an agent that works with the vShield Endpoint service to scan virtual machines by communicating with them through the vShield Thin Agent that is included in VMware Tools. The Thin Agent driver is the software in the guest VM that offloads security events via the hypervisor to the vShield...