Security for vmware virtualized datacenter

Abstract

A datacenter is a multi-layered and centralized information technology services provisioning facility housing large number of complex servers, storage and network devices. Legacy datacenters are managed by system and network administrators by configuring each device manually. With the advent for virtualization, datacenter environments are moving towards automation based models and devices are configured and services are provided in a very less time. Organizations face a rising demand of maximum utilization of IT resources and at the same time minimizing the cost of IT expenses. This led to popularity of virtualized datacenters which provide cost effective solutions through consolidation of available IT resources. Nevertheless, advantages of virtualization are not only limited to cost savings but one of the main benefit of virtualization is the system flexibility which helps in faster provisioning of services, increased uptime and efficient disaster recovery. The benefits of virtualization cannot be overlooked and thus organizations are rapidly moving from traditional datacenters to virtualized environment. However, organizations have hurriedly adopted traditional security architecture in the virtualized datacenters. Organizations need to understand that although the enterprises are conversant with traditional methodology but this can lead to unwanted results if applied on virtualized datacenter environments such as higher complexity and affected performance. Nonetheless, implementing security in virtual environment is more complex because virtualized datacenters involve security challenges present in both traditional datacenters as well as those prone to virtualization. This research focuses on security challenges pertaining to virtualized datacenter deployment and proposes solutions to address these issues in an enterprise environment. An implementation of a virtualized datacenter is presented in this thesis. The datacenter is based on VMware virtualization, Huawei server hardware and storage with Juniper and 3ISYS networking equipment. After establishing a virtualized datacenter, security was implemented on new threat vectors introduced by the virtual environment. Resultantly, a secure, fast, scalable and high available virtualized datacenter is proposed and implemented.