I have been excitedly anticipating the release of the official VMware vSphere security hardening guides for a while now and the good news is that a public draft has just been made available. According to the VMware announcement these vSphere hardening guides have the following “highlights” over the previous VI3 guides:

• Structure: this version uses a standardized format, with formally defined sections, templates, and reference codes.  The goal is to increase clarity and reduce ambiguity, make it easier to reference individual guidelines, and most of all, enhance the ability to automate guideline enforcement.
• Recommendation levels: in following with the formats used by NIST, CIS, and others, this guide categorizes all guidelines into three security levels.  Instead of recommending a single set of guidelines for all environments, this guide encourages more of a risk-based approach, so that individual administrators can decide which guidelines apply to their environment.

There are over 100 recommendations between the guides which are open for public comment during the next month – though as the announcement mentions the final versions probably won’t differ greatly due to them already being part of a private review process.  Definitely worth a read to ensure your vSphere environment is following security best practices where possible.

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