Quoting from the ZDNet:
VMware has traditionally restricted access to its hypervisor code and, while the vendor has made no official announcement about the API sharing program tentatively called “Vsafe”, VMware founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum told ZDNet Australia that the company has started sharing some APIs (Application Program Interfaces) with security vendors.
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Rosenblum said the APIs released as part of the initiative offer security vendors a way to check the memory of a processor, “so they can look for viruses or signatures or other bad things.”…
Read the whole article at the source.
This move was expected and welcome. Allowing security vendors to act at hypervisor level through APIs access addresses in first instance scalability challenge that customers will have face once reaching a high cosolidation ratio. Moving anti-viruses agents, host IDS agents, backup agents, etc. at the hypervisor level is the key to avoid useless memory and storage bottlenecks.
At a later time security vendors can also start correlating events which happen inside every virtual machine from their new hypervisor persepective, creating a new class of network IDS, which track virtual machines’ memories along with their network activity.