Given the current security threats from Frontier AI, vDefend Security Services Platform (SSP) was top of mind for many attendees at the recent VMware Explore 2026. Since it had been some time since I last deployed an earlier version of SSP, I wanted to get some hands-on time with the latest release, which of course also meant writing, or rather prompting AI to write, some deployment automation. 😄

vDefend SSP 5.2 is currently the latest release, and I created a PowerCLI script called deploy_vdefend_security_services_platform.ps1 that makes it super easy to automate the deployment of the SSP Installer OVA. To use the script, simply update the variables with the values for your environment and run the script to perform the deployment.