Book Image

VMware View Security Essentials

By : Daniel Langenhan
Book Image

VMware View Security Essentials

By: Daniel Langenhan

Overview of this book

Most people associate security with network security and focus on firewalls and network monitoring. However, there is more to security than that. Security starts with the establishment of a stable environment, protecting this environment not only from intrusion, but also from malicious intent. It is about tracking the issue and recovering from it. These elements of security are what this book aims to address. VMware View Security Essentials addresses the topic of security in the corporate environment in a new way. It starts with the underlying virtual infrastructure and then delves into securing your base, your connection, and your client. This is not only a “how-to” book, but is also a book that explains the background and the insights of View security for the experienced professional's desktop virtualization. This book takes you through the four major View security areas. Each area deals with all the aspects of security and explains the background as well as laying out simple-to-follow recipes to implement a higher security standard. We start at the Virtualization base and work our way through the various View server types. We will then dive into the problems and issues of securing a connection before we address the security of the desktop itself. We conclude with a look into the backing up of our View installation and preparing for disaster recovery.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Basic View hardening


We now will talk about the steps to harden the View environment.

vSphere hardening

Hardening your vSphere installation is a rather important point; however, it is going beyond the focus of this book. Please have a look at the following official VMware vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-22981

Operating system (OS) hardening

I will just quickly mention that one cannot harden View properly without first hardening the Windows operating system that View resides on. As we want to focus on View hardening, I will just point out the typical OS hardening points as follows:

  • Windows Updates

  • Password policies

  • Antivirus

We will discuss, in the next chapter, Windows Firewall settings. However, Windows hardening that is already in place is mostly sufficient for View.

User accounts

To install and operate View you could use just one user account, the domain-Admin account. However, this would enable an attacker to gain control of the whole system or an unintentional...