Despite its name, the HyTrust Appliance is not a physical piece of hardware. It’s a VMware vSphere-compatible virtual appliance that’s deployed right alongside the rest of your virtual infrastructure. It can be deployed on the same hypervisor that it is actively protecting.
HyTrust Appliance sits in the management plane of the virtual infrastructure. In other words, it sits between the administrators of the virtual infrastructure—the virtualization admins, the network admins, the application owners—and the virtual infrastructure itself. From this centralized vantage point, HyTrust Appliance intercepts all administrative requests for the virtual infrastructure, determines whether or not the request is in accordance with the organization’s defined policy, then permits or denies the request as appropriate.
