One of the pillars of virtualization is the VM isolation property, which can protect the host layer from the VM effectively. Although some possible attacks have been found, virtualization remains an exciting approach to improve the security of your infrastructure. Securing and hardening your vSphere infrastructure should be considered one of the most important steps toward making your infrastructure as reliable as possible.
A new trend is now also to protect VMs from the underlying infrastructure; for example, in the case of a public cloud service, consumers may have some concerns about the security and privacy of their data. VMware offers different encryption mechanisms that make your data private no matter where they are being run.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Tuning and hardening guidelines
• vCenter and ESXi security
• Working with encryption and securing VMs