VMware vSphere

On April 18, 2023, VMware released their “VMware vSphere 8.0 STIG Readiness Guide”. This guide, while not an official STIG, is based on years of experience assisting the DoD in generating the official DISA STIG releases for previous VMware vSphere product versions. Based on their knowledge of the DoD SRGs and previous STIGs, they are confident that the guidance provided within the VMware vSphere 8 STIG Readiness Guide would enable an environment to pass certification with minimal changes should an official DISA STIG be released by the DoD.

Before the addition of Automation Central to VMware Aria Operations (formerly VMware vRealize Operations), I had created my own method of cleaning up outdate snapshots. I documented this method of executing VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows to remediate alerts in my blog post from 2019 titled Automated Alert Remediation in vRealize Operations 7.x using vRealize Orchestrator. This process involved creating an alert in VMware Aria Operations that would be generated when a snapshot reached a specific age.

The United States (U.S.) Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) officially released the VMware vSphere 7.0 STIG on March 15, 2023. This STIG closely follows VMware’s vSphere 7.0 STIG Readiness Guide. As with previous STIG releases, I have created custom compliance and alerting content for use within Aria Operations. This content covers almost all findings for the Virtual Machine STIG, a large portion of the ESXi STIG, and a select number of items from the vCenter STIG.

Almost three years after VMware vSphere 7.0 was released (April 2, 2020), the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) made available the first STIGs for VMware vSphere 7.0 on March 15, 2023. The STIGs can be downloaded from the Public DoD Cyber Exchange STIGs Document Library by searching for “VMware vSphere 7.0 STIG”. I have not completed an in-depth comparison, but from what I’ve noticed, this STIG release aligns with the content previously provided by VMware in their VMware vSphere 7.

In my previous blog post Managing ESXi Local User Accounts from vCenter Server Using PowerCLI, I provided a quick walkthrough of how to manage ESXi local user accounts using VMware PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server. This post will provide a similar walkthrough, but I will utilize VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator this time. Getting Started This walkthrough assumes that you already have a working VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator deployment and that you’ve already established a connection to your VMware vCenter Server instance from VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator.