Preface

This book features two topics that I have a keen interest in: security and virtualization. The virtualization space can be complex in its own right, and like other technological areas, adding sufficient security can prove to be quite labor intensive and often frustrating. As technology evolves, the idea of building an infrastructure or project in a secure manner from the beginning is still somewhat novel in its approach. While more security controls are available in products, I find that such controls and features continue to be underutilized or not implemented at all.

Consider the following: on receiving a plate of pasta at your local restaurant, you are generally asked, "Would you like cheese with that?" This simple scenario and the relationship between pasta and cheese is an apt metaphor for the way security is applied to the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in many businesses today.

My core philosophy is to help those in need. By and large, given my profession, ensuring privacy and providing some form of data security seems the logical approach. I hope this cookbook that deals with security tasks specific to the VMware vSphere 5.5 product set will enable you to get a better understanding of the virtualization environment with step-by-step instructions.

This book covers implementing specific security features of the vSphere 5.5 virtualization platform in a step-by-step format. Each topic contains a high-level overview to give context to the cookbook recipes. This book is not intended to provide reference architectures or theories behind specific security topics implemented by vSphere.