A company has a legacy virtual cluster which was added to the datacenter after a small company was acquired. All VMs on the cluster use the same virtual network interface to connect to the corporate…

Question

Options

• AVisibility on the traffic between the virtual machines can impact confidentiality
• BNIC utilization can exceed 50 percent and impact availability
• CShared virtual switches can negatively impact the integrity of network packets
• DAdditional overhead from network bridging can affect availability

• A
  76% (19)
• B
  4% (1)
• C
  8% (2)
• D
  12% (3)

Explanation

The critical security risk is that all VMs - including externally facing web servers, customer data processors, and financial data processors - share the same virtual network interface (and likely the same virtual switch). In a properly segmented environment, these workloads should be on isolated network segments. When they share a virtual switch, traffic between VMs may traverse the same virtual network fabric. A compromised external web server could sniff traffic from VMs handling sensitive customer or financial data, violating confidentiality. This is the classic risk of improper virtual network segmentation. Option B is a performance concern (and 50% NIC utilization is not even a threshold for concern), not a security risk. Option C is incorrect because virtual switches do not inherently corrupt packet integrity - shared switching is not an integrity threat. Option D describes a performance impact from network bridging overhead, which is not a security risk specific to this configuration, and bridging is not inherent to the described scenario.

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