
Harden the Fabric: Protecting Tenant Secrets in Hyper-V (Ignite video).To learn how you can make your virtual machines more secure with the Host Guardian Service, see the following resources. An owner of a guardian key is an organization that creates and shares a private or public key to own all virtual machines created with that key. If you haven't set up the Host Guardian Service or are running it in local mode on the Hyper-V host and the host has the virtual machine owner's guardian key, you can change the settings described in this topic. You can later distribute the shielded virtual machine to a Host Guardian Fabric. But you can create a shielded virtual machine to run it locally without setting up a Host Guardian Service. You'd most commonly set up the Host Guardian Service for a datacenter. It identifies legitimate Hyper-V hosts and allows them to run a given virtual machine. The Host Guardian Service is a new role in Windows Server 2016. The level of security you get depends on the host hardware you run, the virtual machine generation, and whether you set up the service, called the Host Guardian Service, that authorizes hosts to start shielded virtual machines.

You can protect virtual machines from inspection, theft, and tampering from both malware that may run on the host, and datacenter administrators. Use the virtual machine security settings in Hyper-V Manager to help protect the data and state of a virtual machine. Applies to: Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019
