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Applying additional security hardening enhancements in ESXi 8.0

01.10.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

While responding to a few ESXi security configuration questions, I was referencing our ESXi Security documentation, which includes a lot of useful information and latest best practices. It is definitely worth re-reviewing this section from time to time to take advantage of all the ESXi security enhancements to help protect and secure your vSphere environment.

In certain areas of the ESXi security documentation, I noticed that it mentions CLI and API, but it does not always provide an example that customers can then reference and use in their Automation, which is really the only guaranteed method to ensure configurations are consistent across your vSphere environment. After answering some of the security related questions, especially on the Automation examples, I figure it would be useful to share this information more broadly so that folks are aware of some of the new and existing security enhancements along with some of their implications if you are not implementing them.

Speaking of new ESXi security enhancements, one of the new features that was introduced in ESXi 8.0 is the ability to disable ESXi Shell access for non-root users. While this might sound like a pretty basic feature, applying this towards the vCenter Server service account vpxuser can help add another layer of protection for your ESXi hosts against attackers. It turns out that users with ESXi Shell access can also modify other local users password on ESXi host including the root user. By restricting ESXi Shell access for the vpxuser, you prevent attackers, which can also be insiders who have access to vCenter Server the ability to just change the ESXi root password without knowing the original password. As a result, this can lock you out of your ESXi hosts or worse, enable an attacker to encrypt your workloads, especially as the rise ransomeware attacks has been increasing.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, PowerCLI, Security, vSphere 8.0 Tags // esxcli, ESXi 8.0, kickstart, security

How to replace some of ESXi Kickstart automation with new configstorecli commands?

01.06.2023 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I had received a question a couple of weeks back from a customer who was already automating their ESXi installation using ESXi Kickstart, also known as ESXi Scripted Installation but they had ran into an issue when migrating the exact same automation to the latest ESXi 7.0 releases.

The method the customer was using to manage their ESXi password policies, which was by updating the /etc/pam.d/passwd file, no longer function as expected and this was a result of the introduction of the ESXi ConfigStore, which I have written about here.

As mentioned in the article, the goal of the ESXi ConfigStore is the following:

The goal of the ConfigStore, initially introduced in ESXi 7.0 Update 1, is to centrally manage all configurations for an ESXi host instead of relying on different methods including a variety of configuration files.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // configstorecli, ESXi 7.0, ESXi 8.0, kickstart

Quick Tip - How to check if vSAN TRIM/UNMAP is enabled in VMware Cloud on AWS Cluster?

01.04.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

While the original question was for checking whether a specific VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) cluster has the vSAN TRIIM/UNMAP feature enabled, the solutions below is applicable to any recent vSAN 7.x or 8.x deployment. There are two ways you check, either using the vSphere UI by selecting the cluster and navigating to Configure->vSAN->Services and expanding the Advanced Options tile or simply leveraging PowerCLI and the vSAN API to retrieve the exact same information.

vSphere UI

vSAN API using PowerCLI

$clusterName = "Cluster-1"
$vsanConfigSystem = Get-VsanView -Id VsanVcClusterConfigSystem-vsan-cluster-config-system
$clusterMoRef = (Get-Cluster $clusterName).ExtensionData.MoRef
$vsanConfigSystem.VsanClusterGetConfig($clusterMoRef).unmapConfig

 

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud on AWS, VSAN Tags // unmap, VMware Cloud on AWS, VSAN

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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