SAFEGUARDS FOR SECURING VIRTUALIZED SERVERS

This bulletin outlines the security recommendations that NIST recently provided in Special Publication (SP) 800-125A, Security Recommendations for Hypervisor Deployment on Servers. The document provides technical guidelines about the secure execution of baseline functions of the hypervisor, regardless of the hypervisor architecture. In the past, a user wishing to set up a computing server generally needed to use a dedicated host with dedicated resources, such as a central processing unit (CPU), memory, network, and storage. Modern systems have technology that lets one create virtual machines to emulate what used to be physical, dedicated resources. This practice is known as virtualization and supports more scalable and dynamic environments. 

https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=925410