Microsoft offers guide to help secure Hyper-V

Are you virtualizing your datacenter environment with Microsoft Hyper-V technology? If so, are you taking the necessary precautions needed to secure your virtual machines and your virtualized servers from attack? After all, just because it’s a virtual environment, that doesn’t give us the right to throw security concerns out the window.

To help address security concerns, Microsoft is creating a new Solution Accelerator, Project Codename Teton — the Hyper-V Security Guide. Currently in Beta, this guide addresses key security issues around server virtualization. All of the security recommendations in the guide have been fully tested in Microsoft labs and verified by customers and partners under real-world conditions.

The guide is intended for IT professionals, security specialists, network architects, computer engineers, and other IT consultants who plan application or infrastructure development and deployments of Windows Server 2008 for servers in enterprise environments.

The following chapters are currently included:

• Chapter 1: Hardening Hyper-V. The guide provides prescriptive guidance for hardening the Hyper-V server role, including several best practices for installing and configuring Hyper-V with a focus on security. These best practices include measures for reducing the attack surface of Hyper-V as well as recommendations for properly configuring secure virtual networks and storage devices on a Hyper-V host server.
• Chapter 2: Delegating Virtual Machine Management. The ability to safely and securely delegate administrative access to virtual machine resources within an organization is essential. The guide highlights several available methods to administer different aspects of a virtual machine infrastructure and ways to control administrative access to different servers and at different levels.
• Chapter 3: Protecting virtual machines. The guide also provides prescriptive guidance for securing virtual machine resources, including best practices and detailed steps for protecting virtual machines by using a combination of file system permissions, encryption, and auditing.

The Microsoft Hyper-V Security Guide is now available as a Beta download. Want a sneak peek at the guide? It’s fast, free, and easy. Just join the Beta program on Microsoft Connect to get started.