Hello community,
Surprise. The company has a data center currently comprised of 100+ physical servers. Probably could grow to 400+
On a previous project for another org I was exposed to vSPHERE, vCENTER, vCOPS, and vCLOUD. The large number of vmware products becomes confusing, hence I am asking the community for recommendations. We are tasked with building enterprise environment where we can do the following:
- procure a single "gold master" Windows Server 2012 image/ova that is mildly hardened using industry best practices or some existing known security policy like PCI or NIST (don't want to do this part manually!)
- once this golden Windows Server 2012 image is procured we will test it in our lab to verify it is functional
- after the golden image is tested in our lab we will use VMware tools to deploy 300+ images to our brand new server farm.
- we will surely not be using VMware and not any competing product (Hyper-V, etc)
From: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-TWP-vSPHR-SECRTY-HRDNG-USLET-101-WEB-1.pdf
"By capturing a hardened base operating system image (with no applications
installed) in a template, you can ensure that all your virtual machines are created
with a known baseline level of security. You can then use this template to create
other, application-specific, templates or use the application template to deploy
virtual machines"
What vmware tools are needed? And any source to get a prehardened PCI/NIST win2008 image?
Thank
