Virtualization and Nested Virtualization Technology: Concept, Architecture and Attack Vector Model

In digital era, the Internet is a vital part of the life of people. Cloud services are Internet-based services that are available for clients. Virtualization is the backbone of Cloud technology. IBM invented Virtualization technology in 1960 to achieve maximum Usage of hardware resources. Virtualization is the technique by which we can create a virtual version of some resources like storage, network, servers, operating platforms, etc. Virtualization helps in optimizing resource utilization and delivering resources efficiently. This technology improves the rate of load efficiency, energy consumption in data centers, effective resource sharing, and saves cost. In traditional computer virtualization, a hypervisor operates various virtual machines concurrently. In nested virtualization, a hypervisor can manage other hypervisors with their VMs. In this paper, we discuss the virtualization concept, architecture of virtualization and nested virtualization. We also perform a comparative analysis of the virtualization tools. We present the security perspective of virtualization and nested virtualization. We present the attack vector model in a virtualized environment, which shows the source to destination direction of the attack. We expect that this research will inspire researchers to work in this direction.