how to make virtual machine copy not to work or startup

Question

Dear All

I have virtual machine on vmware server, i need to make it secure, suppose if someone get the copy of this virtual machine, it must not start up or get corrupt!! can any one help to do this....

thanks in advance

cheers

Answer 1

This is a very difficult thing to do, and it is going to be almost impossible to come up with something that is "foolproof". BUT, you can get some reasonable amount of protection by inserting something in the host configuration that the guest VM can check on and self-destruct if it isn't there. For example, stick a "secret" into /etc/vmware/config on this host with the value machine.id = secret. Then using vmware-tools on the guest you can check on the value of this with the command /usr/local/sbin/vmware-guestd --cmd 'machine.id.get', and make sure it matches "secret".

VMware has an article on this sort of communication between host and VM here: http://www.vmware.com/support/gsx3/doc/tools_guestd_string_gsx.html.

Of course the actual protection this provides is totally useless if someone knows what to look for or puts any real effort into reverse engineering your booby-trap. If you need something better, you might look into VMware ACE, which is their product that allows all sorts of control over who does what with the VM and when.

Good luck!

--jed