vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide

This guide represents a new approach to providing security guidance from VMware. As compared with the previous VI3 Hardening Guides, the current guide has the following highlights

• 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.

Overall, there are more than 100 guidelines. The guide itself is split into the following major sections:

Click on the links to download.

• Introduction (Rev B)
• Virtual Machines (Rev B)
• Host (Rev B)
• vNetwork (Rev B)
• vCenter (Rev B)
• Console OS (for ESX) (Rev B)