Category: vsphere 6.5

vSphere 6.5 VM and vSAN Encryption FAQ now available

I’m really pleased to announce the availability of the vSphere 6.5 VM and vSAN Encryption FAQ! This FAQ is built upon over a year of questions that have come in to me on both VM and vSAN Encryption. We’ve reached critical mass and now it’s time to share!

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Key Manager Concepts and Topology Basics for VM and vSAN Encryption

At VMworld 2017 VM and vSAN Encryption and security of vSphere in general became VERY popular topics. And in those discussions the topic of Key Managers came up and specifically “How many key managers should I have?” was a recurring question.

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Secure Boot for ESXi 6.5 – Hypervisor Assurance

I’ve talked about how vSphere has been moving towards a “secure by default” stance over the past few years. This can clearly be seen in the new vSphere 6.5 Security Configuration Guide where the number of “hardening” steps are growing smaller with every release. In this blog post we will go over another “secure by default” feature of vSphere 6.5 that provides hypervisor assurance, Secure Boot for ESXi.

One of the coolest things in 6.5, in my opinion, is the adoption of Secure Boot for ESXi. Now, you might say “But my laptop has had Secure Boot since Windows 8, what’s the big deal?”

Well, the “big deal” is that we’ve gone beyond the default behavior of Secure Boot and we now leverage the capabilities of the UEFI firmware to ensure that ESXi not only boots with a signed bootloader validated by the host firmware but that it also ensures that unsigned code won’t run on the hypervisor. Best of all, it’s simple to implement! Let’s dive in!

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