Mastering VMware vSphere™ 4

13.6. Understanding VMsafe

As an end user of VMware vSphere, the VMsafe application programming interfaces (APIs) are not something you can actually see, configure, enable, disable, or otherwise manipulate. However, understanding what the VMsafe APIs are is, I think, an important part to understanding how security in virtualized environments is evolving and changing.

First introduced in early 2008 at VMware's VMworld Europe user conference, the VMsafe APIs provide a set of published interfaces that third-party application developers can use to build security solutions for virtualized environments. One such solution that is commonly described is an antivirus solution. Without the VMsafe APIs, users are required to run antivirus software inside ...