The present disclosure presents a method and apparatus configured to provide for the trusted execution of virtual machines (VMs) on a virtualization server, e.g., for executing VMs on a virtualization server provided within Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud environment. A physical multi-core CPU may be configured with a hardware trust anchor. The trust anchor itself may be configured to manage session keys used to encrypt/decrypt instructions and data when a VM (or hypervisor) is executed on one of the CPU cores. When a context switch occurs due to an exception, the trust anchor swaps the session key used to encrypt/decrypt the contents of memory and cache allocated to a VM (or hypervisor).