Time for a book review. This book was released in November last year so I know it’s a bit late but I’ve just got my hands on it. I hope you won’t mind.
It is written by Mike Greer and is just over 300 pages long, divided into 13 chapters. It starts with a brief introduction on threat and vulnerabilities, describing the various ways your environment can be vulnerable to attacks i.e. Hypervisor, VMs, Users, Network, Storage and even physical threats. Once done, the book goes into looking at all those components in detail and describes the recipes of fixing those vulnerabilities in the following chapters.
What I also like about this book is that while it doesn’t cover other products in the VMware ecosystem (although it would be nice to have a book focussing on them too), it does go a bit further and covers vShield Manager and its various roles. I would have liked NSX side of things covered as well but then one could argue that it’s not that widespread yet and it could potentially be a book in itself. This book also covers vSphere certificates, a very important topic that is still not clear to many vSphere administrators so earns a few extra brownie points there.
There are many resources available, focussing on vSphere security e.g. the vSphere Security Hardening guide but having all that information in one reference is difficult to find. Also, a “cookbook” style book such as this one, has screenshots, pre-requisites and “How it works”, all of which are great help to new administrators. This is where I think there is a gap and this book certainly aims to fill it.
I would recommend this book to all new admins but also old ones, as a good quick reference to vSphere security configuration.
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