The hypervisor platform is, undoubtedly, a secure environment from its technical architecture point of view. The hypervisor has a small footprint of around 200 MB, and it also has APIs for monitoring, so you don't need third-party applications on the host. You can refer to the VMware vSphere Hardening Guide for more details on security configurations at https://www.vmware.com/ca/en/security/hardening-guides.
To protect the ESXi hosts against unauthorized intrusion and misuse, consider the following options for improving infrastructure security:
- Limit user access:
- To improve security, restrict user access to the management interface and enforce access security policies, such as setting up password restrictions.
- The ESXi shell has privileged access to certain parts of the host, therefore provide only trusted users with ESXi shell login access.
- Confirm that SSH access is disabled. This prevents remote access to the console of ESXi hosts.
- Use only VMware sources to upgrade...