Yippee..a free tool from VMware! This nice little tool runs compliance scans against vSphere hosts and compares the results to the VMware Hardening Guidelines. Almost a year ago I wrote a short blog announcing their hardening guide here. Since then, VMware released a hardening guide for vSphere 4.1, which you can find here.
This tool beats trying to do manual scans to see how compliant your environment is. The free tool only scans five hosts at once, and I can’t find a way to display which VMs are not in compliance. It just gives the server an overall score for each items. So it has very limited utility, IMHO. If you want more detailed information, then you step up to their paid product, vCenter Configuration Manager or a third-party tool.
You can download the free tool here. Be aware that you need Java installed on the computer you run the scan from, and on 64-bit systems it may default to the wrong Java directory path. Scanning my lab host took less than a minute, and came up with several non-compliant settings, most I was aware of and accepted the risk since it’s just my home ESX server.
