VMware vSphere™ and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment

Chapter 1. What Is a Security Threat?

Before we can begin our discourse on virtualization security, we need to first understand a few common terms and ideas. Specifically, we need to know how the virtual infrastructure fits into the entire picture of the data center, the virtual ecosystem, or as we will use within this book, virtual environment. We will define the boundaries of the virtual environment and how it changes the data center from a 10,000 foot view. In addition to this basic definition, we need to specifically define threat, vulnerability, and failure in terms of virtualization security. These key terms will be used throughout this book, and many definitions exist for each one. We will create specific definitions and follow up with ...