How to Protect Your Virtual Infrastructure with Hytrust Appliance

If you have a large in complex virtual infrastructure, you want to consider a new way of protecting it from—from your end-users. Hello, I’m David Strum and we are looking at VMware vCenter management screens that show you a complex setup of eight different ESX hosts running dozens of VMs in a test environment. As a virtual infrastructure administrator, I have extraordinary powerful capabilities in my finger tips that can be used for good but could also be misused.

For example with one simple right click, I can bring down the core elements of the infrastructure including exchange share point or even the vCenter server itself. We can prevent this with a high trust appliance version 2.0 which allows you to setup policies of access rules and other security measures to segregate your virtual infrastructure from your users. Here, we’re looking at its main dashboard and you can see our entire collection of hyper—the appliance sets on our network in between the virtual infrastructure and the users of various VMware software pieces that manage it. It creates wastes to separate individual’s duties who only need to manage the applications running on each VM or the network pieces or to perform compliance odes of our virtualized hosts. We create a new policy for this vCenter by going to policy’s resources, expand the three, find this center, click on Apply on the Rule sets to assign it to our vCenter core points and click Deploy. This will setup a rule that prevents anyone other than a network administrator from removing or powering down this virtual machine. We finished the step by going to policies roles, edit the HT Core Admin then click View All and we cab scroll down to see the rule covering powering the VM on and off. That’s part of this collection.

Now on our data center admin can, tries to go into the views for your client. You’ll see it can’t remove this host because our policy has prevented him from his action. We can place further restrictions on how our VMs are used such as preventing them from being moved or copied by the motion’s live migration service in this screen here in our rule constraint section. This is something that is unique to high trust product. Let’s show another new feature called Password Vault. When that’s enabled all the root passwords of our managed hosts, our change by the high trust appliance to something very secure and unique so what happens if we manually need temporary access to one of our hosts, we go into the host screen, click on the host number two and choose the password and enter the appropriate information. We have two minutes to make a copy of it and then a specified two hours to log in and make the changes. Another feature is more than 30 different hardening procedures that are performed automatically. We want to make sure that our hosts are underpayment card industry compliance guidelines. We go to the host templates, click on the PCI entry and you can see the list of the procedures as we scroll down.

Now, let’s show you how easy it is to do this compliance monitoring and remediation with the sample policy that I have set up. We select the host that we want to check, run the remediate process and we see that most of them are within our guidelines but one host needs further assessment. A new feature is to search for particular host and then perform any necessary actions on it. Here, you see this very healthful for larger virtual installations. Getting used to the various collection of menus commands, policies and the rules will take some doing as well as setting a proper access controls for each role and tying things all together.

Thanks for watching my screen cast review. This is David Strum. Feel free to watch other videos at webinformant.tv. Check out my other articles or book me for an upcoming speaking gig using the links here.