i Virtualization and Information Security A Virtualized DMZ Design Consideration Using VMware ESXi 4.1 By

ii Virtualization is one of the most widely used technologies in modern day information technology datacentres. Companies like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat have invested a lot of money and expertise into making virtualization available to small and medium sized organizations with budget constraints. The technology is now very easy and physically flexible to deploy. Virtualization is so flexible that even traditional physical DMZs (demilitarized zones) can now be virtualized. Three different ways of deploying virtual DMZs are investigated in this research and the level of security provided by virtualized DMZs was compared to the level of security of traditional physical DMZs. Using VMware ESXi 4.1 as the hypervisor, a test bed was set up to determine which DMZ design was the most secure, whereas the DMZs represented a typical network of an organization. The test bed comprised domain controllers, an email server, DNS server, DHCP server, database server, application server and a web server, runnin