Preface
Welcome to VMware vCloud Security. In this book, you will learn how to mitigate the security threats on a private cloud running VMware vCloud Director. This book will enable the reader with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to build a highly secured private cloud running VMware vCloud. We will also look at a detailed step-by-step coverage with screenshots, which are usually not available in Cloud Security product manuals.
You will learn how to configure and manage vShield App, which is a hyper-based firewall. You will also learn how to use vShield Endpoint, which can help you to strengthen your cloud security by mitigating threats from virus and malware attack.
In the last chapter, you will learn some advanced concepts of cloud assessment for maintaining compliance standards that are available across the world. You will also learn how to run a data security scan and review the violation report that is generated by vShield Data Security and take necessary action to mitigate those risks.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Installation and Configuration of VMware vCloud Director, covers installing vCloud Director and configuring it for first-time use. It also introduces security roles in VMware vCloud Director, integration of LDAP servers with vCloud, and security hardening of vCloud Director.
Chapter 2, Securing Your vCloud Using vShield App, will walk you through a hypervisor-based firewall that protects applications in the virtual datacenter from network-based attacks. It also focuses on creating access control policies based on logical constructs such as VMware vCenter Server containers and VMware vShield Security Groups, but not just physical constructs such as IP addresses.
Chapter 3, Mitigating Threats Using VMware vShield Endpoint, will help you to strengthen security for virtual machines while improving performance for Endpoint protection. It also talks about vShield Endpoint that offloads antivirus and anti-malware agent processing to a dedicated Security Virtual Appliance that is delivered and supported by VMware partners. In this chapter, you will see the architecture of EPSEC and how to implement it.
Chapter 4, Overview of VMware vShield Data Security, will talk about visibility of sensitive data stored within your organization's virtualized environments. It shows you how to use reports from data scans performed by vShield Data Security, and ensures that sensitive data is adequately protected. It also shows you how to assess compliance with regulations around the world. In this chapter, you will see how to define data security policies, run scans, and analyze results.
What you need for this book
You need VMware vSphere 5.1, which includes VMware vSphere ESXi, vCenter Server, any SSH Client (Putty), and vSphere Client. Also, you need the VMware vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) product suite.
Who this book is for
This book is a valuable addition for technical professionals with Cloud Security administration skills and some amount of VMware vCloud experience, who wish to learn about advanced Cloud Networking and Security products and where they fit and how to configure them as well to mitigate risks in the VMware vCloud based private cloud.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "To prevent loading it on the next reboot, the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\vsepflt key needs to be modified, and the value of DWORD changed to 4."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass vmware123 -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias http
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once you add the vCenter Server, you can see it under the Manage & Monitor tab.".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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