vSphere 8 Security Configuration & Hardening

 

 

The VMware vSphere Security Configuration & Hardening Guide (SCG) has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years, remaining an essential resource for virtualization administrators committed to fortifying their infrastructure. With each new release of vSphere, the SCG adapts, integrating emerging security threats and best practices tailored for a modern landscape where virtualized environments are frequently targeted. This guide empowers administrators to adopt a proactive security stance by offering detailed recommendations that transcend basic hardening techniques, such as pausing unnecessary services and implementing secure configurations. 

In today’s dynamic hybrid cloud ecosystems, virtualization security requires more than just compliance; it ignites a culture of vigilance within organizations. By actively engaging with the SCG's frameworks for auditing and continuous monitoring, enterprises can ensure their configurations remain robust against continuously evolving vulnerabilities. Administrators can harness automation tools to simplify adherence to these guidelines while elevating their risk management strategies—turning what was once a mere compliance checklist into a vibrant part of their overall security posture. Embracing this holistic approach not only protects sensitive data but also instills confidence in stakeholders reliant on the secure performance of virtualized infrastructures.

Download the Latest Version

The Security Configuration & Hardening Guide for VMware vSphere 8 can be downloaded Vsphere 8 security configuration & Hardening guide.

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VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA

The VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA has officially crossed the threshold into general availability, marking a pivotal moment for enterprises eager to harness the power of AI while maintaining control over their data. The team behind this integration has unveiled two dynamic dashboards dedicated to GPU monitoring within VCF Operations. These dashboards not only enhance visibility into resource usage but also empower IT administrators with real-time insights, allowing them to optimize performance and preemptively address potential issues.

Additionally, a treasure trove of customizable PowerCLI scripts has emerged as part of this release, simplifying the setup process for users diving into VMware's powerful AI capabilities. These scripts serve as a flexible foundation that can be tailored to meet specific organizational needs, thereby accelerating deployment times and reducing time-to-value. With these advancements, the VMware Private AI Foundation is positioned as not just a solution but a robust framework designed to streamline operations and maximize efficiency in an increasingly competitive landscape.

we explore the new features in the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. This is an add-on product to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The set of AI tools and platforms within that VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA platform are developed as part of an engineering collaboration between VMware and NVIDIA.

We describe the technical values that this new platform brings to data scientists and to the DevOps people who serve them, with the following outline

• Providing an improved experience for the data scientist in provisioning and managing their AI platforms using VCF tools
• Deep learning VM images as a building block for these data science environments
• Using a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach with NVIDIA’s Large Language Model (LLM) microservices
• Monitoring and your GPU consumption and availability from within the VCF platform

The outline architecture for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA to see how the different layers are positioned within it with respect to each other. We will dig into many of these areas in this article and how they are used for implementing applications on VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

The VMware Private AI Foundation powered by NVIDIA technology transforms the landscape for data scientists, making it not only easier to provision resources but also simplifying ongoing management tasks. By leveraging Aria Automation, the platform allows teams to focus more on modeling and inference rather than getting bogged down by infrastructure details. This abstraction means that the complexities of cloud or on-premises deployments are seamlessly managed behind the scenes, enabling data scientists to harness powerful tools without needing deep technical expertise in virtualization or orchestration. Using a set of pre-configured Deep Learning VM images as a starting point accelerates deployment time and ensures consistency across projects. This curated environment is designed with optimized performance in mind, allowing practitioners to dive straight into their work with minimal setup hassle. Furthermore, VMware’s approach fosters innovation, as data scientists can experiment freely—spinning up different solutions swiftly while remaining insulated from infrastructure constraints. The synergy between VMware and NVIDIA not only streamlines operational efficiency but also propels organizations forward in their AI endeavors by reducing friction and enhancing productivity at every stage of the workflow.

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VMware vSphere Foundation

VMware vSphere Foundation embodies the essence of robust infrastructure management, laying a powerful groundwork for businesses seeking to navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving digital landscape. With its unparalleled stability and performance, VMware has long been a trusted provider of infrastructure solutions for businesses worldwide. This reliability not only streamlines operations, but also instils confidence that enterprises can pivot swiftly in response to changes — whether scaling up resources or adapting to new workloads.

vSphere's ability to seamlessly integrate with existing technologies, enhancing flexibility without forcing organizations into an uncomfortable technology overhaul. As businesses increasingly emphasize hybrid environments and seek multi-cloud strategies, the versatility offered by VMware solutions becomes indispensable. Moreover, vSphere's proactive resource management tools empower IT teams to optimize their infrastructures intelligently, ensuring that organizations are equipped with the necessary agility and resilience needed in today’s market dynamics. By leveraging such innovations, companies are not just maintaining business continuity; they are unlocking the potential for astonishing growth and transformation.

VMware vSphere Foundation offers an ideal transition path for those currently using vSphere Enterprise Plus, or vCloud Suite Standard. At the same time, customers with lighter requirements such as basic hardware consolidation or virtualization on a very small number of servers are still able to use vSphere Standard or vSphere Essentials Plus Kit.

VMware vSphere Foundation is a new integrated offering from VMware. However, to help understand the makeup of the solution, the following overview refers to the legacy components that went in to making it:

• vSphere Enterprise Plus
• vSphere ESXi
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
• vCenter Standard

• Aria Suite Standard
• Aria Operations
• Aria Operations for Logs
• Aria Suite Lifecycle

• vSAN Enterprise (100 GiB per CPU Core per host)
• Production Support

On top of vSphere Foundation, you can deploy a variety of use-case based add-ons, as follows:

• VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
• VMware Ransomware Recovery
• VMware Site Recovery
• vSAN Enterprise (Expansion)
• VMware Load Balancer (NSX Advanced Load Balancer)
• Tanzu Mission Control

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading! 

VMware Private AI

VMware Private AI

In the fast-paced world of AI, privacy and control of corporate data are paramount concerns for organizations. That's why the architectural approach for AI services, such as VMware Private AI, is gaining traction. By leveraging this approach, businesses can ensure that their sensitive data remains secure and protected.

This architectural approach for AI services enables privacy and control of corporate data, choice of open source and commercial AI solutions, quick time-to-value, and integrated security and management.

AI solutions for your environment—NVIDIA AI Software, open–source community repositories, and independent software vendors. Deploy with confidence, knowing that VMware has built partnerships with the leading AI providers. Achieve great performance in your model with vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation GPU integrations. Augment productivity by eliminating redundant tasks and building intelligent process improvement mechanisms.

Benefits

• Get the Flexibility of Choice: Get the flexibility to run a range of AI software for your environment, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, open-source repositories, or ISV offerings with the VMware Private AI. Achieve the best fit for your application and use case.
• Deploy with confidence: VMware Private AI offers generative AI solutions in partnership with NVIDIA and other partners, all of whom are respected leaders in the high-tech space. This enables you to securely run your private corporate data to do fine-tuning, run inferencing, and, in some cases, even training in-house.
• Achieve Great Performance: This solution supports NVIDIA GPU technologies and pooling these GPUs to extract great performance for AI workloads. The latest benchmark study compared AI workloads on VMware + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform against bare metal. The results show performance that is similar to and, in some cases, better than bare metal. Hence putting AI workloads on virtualized solutions preserves the performance while adding the benefits of virtualization, such as ease of management and enterprise-grade security.
• Augment Productivity: Leverage VMware Private AI for your generative AI models and maximize your organization’s productivity by building private chatbots and enabling automation of repetitive tasks, smart search, and building intelligent process monitoring tools.

Top Use Cases

VMware Private AI solutions enable several use cases for enterprises by securely enabling large language models’, fine-tuning, and deployment (inference) within their private corporate environment. Here is a description of the top use cases that enterprises can enable using these platforms.

• Code Generation: These solutions accelerate developer velocity by enabling code generation. Privacy in code generation is of utmost concern. With VMware Private AI solutions, enterprises can use their models without risking losing their IP or data.
• Contact centers resolution experience: VMware Private AI can significantly improve customer experience by improving the high-quality content, quality, and feedback contact centers provide customers with improved accuracy of responses.
• IT Operations Automation: Enterprises can significantly reduce IT operations agents’ time by enhancing operational automation like incident management, reporting, ticketing, and monitoring using VMware Private AI.
  
• Advanced information retrieval: Platforms based on VMware Private AI can significantly help in employee productivity by improving document search, policy, and procedure research.

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What is vSAN ESA?

vSAN ESA will unlock the capabilities of modern hardware by adding optimization for high-performance, NVMe-based TLC flash devices with vSAN, building off vSAN’s Original Storage Architecture(vSAN OSA). vSAN was initially designed to deliver highly-performant storage with SATA/SAS devices, the most common storage media at the time. vSAN 8 will give our customers the freedom of choice to decide which of the two existing architectures (vSAN OSA or vSAN ESA) to leverage to best suit their needs.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture

This new architecture will showcase some innovative ways of processing and storing data. vSAN 8 with ESA will introduce structural changes like a new log-structured file system (vSAN LFS), a new write-optimized log-structured object manager, and a new object format. All these changes will help vSAN ESA achieve near device-level performance and store data and metadata in an extremely fast and efficient way.

vSAN 8 using either architecture

vSAN 8 with vSAN Express Storage Architecture will bring innovative updates that deliver supreme performance and efficiency levels, enhanced resilience, simplified operations, and ease of management. We believe the vSAN ESA can help our customers capitalize on the benefits of the latest generation of hardware to run the most demanding workloads with the highest levels of performance and efficiency.

Additional enhancements for vSAN in vSphere 8 Update 2:

• Integrated File Services for Cloud Native and Traditional Workloads.
• Improved Performance for Disaggregated Environments.
• New AF-0 ReadyNode profile for small deployments.
• Default Auto-Policy Intelligence for optimal vSAN SPBM policies.
• Improved Clarity with Cluster Capacity Reporting.
• Improved Security Through Enhanced Key Management.
• Intuitive Detection of VMs and Disks Consuming the Most Resources.
• Improved Detection of Performance Bottleneck in Stretched Clusters.
• Simplified configuration for 2-Node and Stretched Clusters.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture is ideal for all of our customers and cloud providers moving to this latest generation of hardware.  Delivering space-efficient and highly resilient storage without any performance compromise, using all claimed storage devices for capacity, and new compression enhancements significantly change the mathematics in favour of the vSAN ESA.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

What’s New with VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1* delivering key enhancements across storage, networking, compute and lifecycle management to enable customers to scale their private cloud environments and improve resiliency. 

VCF Support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

VCF 5.1 is enhanced support for NVMe storage platforms with new support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) that enables customers to deploy next generation servers that deliver higher performance, more scalability and improved efficiency.  By co-existing with vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA), vSAN ESA is an architecture designed to achieve all-new levels of efficiency, scalability, and performance optimized to exploit the full potential of the very latest in hardware to unlock new capabilities for VCF customers. 

Networking and Security Enhancements

The VCF 5.1 released contains several enhancements which simplify the configuration of advanced networking and security.  The most impactful change is the improved SDDC Manager workflows, which allow administrators to configure new workload domains and clusters with multiple physical network adapters and multiple virtual distributed switches prepared for NSX.

Other networking enhancements have been made which further leverage NSX, with a simplified and compliant topology for stretched clusters configured for vSAN OSA, and the ability to configure edge clusters without 2-tier routing.

These fine-tuned networking enhancements allow Administrators to deliver highly performant networking and security topologies which can be easily scaled and lifecycle managed.

Key enhancements available with VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 include:

• VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Cloud Management integration.
• Lifecycle management updates, including asynchronous prechecks and support for vSphere Lifecycle Manager images in VCF management domains.
• Numerous networking enhancements for vSAN Stretch clusters, NSX Edge clusters and enhanced SDDC Manager workflows. 
• The VMware Identity Broker service allows Administrators to connect to third party/external identity providers (IDPs) for handling and processing identities, credentials and authentication (including multifactor authentication).  OKTA is now supported as a 3rd party VMware identity broker in VMware Cloud Foundation environments.
• New Terraform provider for VMware Cloud Foundation that enables the ability to use Infrastructure as code to deploy, operate and manage VMware Cloud Foundation with machine-readable definition files to achieve a specific desired state.   

Accelerate Data Driven Innovation in VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation from the release of the next generation of VMware Data Services Manager, as well as partnerships and Tech Previews with Google Cloud and MinIO, all of which will help customers accelerate their data-driven innovation.

VMware Live Recovery 

VMware Live Recovery, a new solution that provides protection against ransomware as well as disaster recovery across VMware Cloud in one unified console. VMware Live Recovery is designed to help organizations protect their VMware-based applications and data from a wide variety of threats, including ransomware attacks, infrastructure failure, human error, and more. By bringing together the functions of established products VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery with Ransomware Recovery – and combining them under a unified, flexible, and SaaS based console – customers can realize comprehensive enterprise protection within a single solution.

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VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer

VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer

Extend your private cloud vSphere workloads to AWS Cloud — securely, rapidly and easily. Get started to estimate the resources required to run various workloads within VMware Cloud on AWS.

The vSAN Sizer (at https://vsansizer.vmware.com) is a sophisticated sizing tool that will step you through the process of sizing your performance and capacity needs accurately.  The vSAN Sizer will be updated to accommodate running vSAN using the OSA, or ESA.  The desired architecture can be selected during the sizing process.

VMware Cloud Sizer is a free online service that helps customers assess workloads and estimate required resources to run virtual machines in VMware Cloud on AWS environment efficiently.  It is a vital tool for capacity estimations used for migration project planning and can also provide insights for greenfield deployment and extension of the existing VMware Cloud environment.

Sizer helps customers to estimate the number of hosts required to run their virtual machines (VMs) and currently supporting VMware Cloud on AWS.

Depending on your requirements, VMware Cloud Sizer provides customers rough estimates based on industry averages or can be used for more accurate information using performance data of customer’s workloads.

 

Once a customer gets estimates from the VMware Cloud Sizer, they could work with the VMware Cloud Economics team to evaluate the financial aspects of the migration and build TCO.

Together with simplified profile settings, UI enhancements and Quick Sizer which now also supports external storage VMware Cloud Sizer becomes an even more handy tool making it essential for capacity planning.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!