One of the most important documents for any vSphere administrator or architect has been released. The vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide is now available. The guide was announced on the vSphere Blog by Mike Foley – vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide – Official Release. I’d like to thank Mike and the rest of the VMware Security Team that was involved in putting this invaluable resource together. It has been reformatted from the previous version to make it easier to use. I think you’ll all like the new improvements.

This is an essential resource for enterprise and secure environments. I also hope that all VMware customers take the time to review this as a lot of the recommendations can be easily implemented and greatly improve the security of your environments. Of course this isn’t the only measure you need to take to protect your environment, keeping up to date with patches of your VMware software is also important as part of your overall security strategy.

Please bare in mind that the guide has been created to be applicable to all VMware environments, but that not all settings or recommendations will be relevant to all environments or all customers. You should review the settings and make a determination as to which settings are applicable to you. VMware has made this process easy by defining different profiles within the guide. So you should look at the profile (explained on the intro page of the guide) that best fits your environment and then review the settings that fit into that profile.

The guide itself is available here. The change log is available here. The central location for all of the VMware hardening guides is http://vmware.com/go/securityguides and this will be the permanent home for the vSphere 5.1 hardening guide also.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.