VMware released the <a href="http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-19605">vSphere 5.0 Hardening Guide</a> this month and I wanted to take the opportunity to blog my way through it in order to increase my familiarity, heighten its visibility, and provide a forum for discussion of the recommendations and methods to implement an assessment in your own environment.

Since the hypervisor is the heart of your datacenter, let's start with the ESXi guidelines:
<ul>
	<li>Guideline Title: Use Active Directory for local user authentication
<ul>
	<li>Title: enable-ad-auth</li>
	<li>Discussion: The credentials to your ESXi hosts are among the most sensitive in your entire datacenter. The root password should only be given to personnel that have an explicit need for it. Other users that need to login to hosts outside of vCenter can have permissions granted to their Active Directory account. David Davis has a <a href="http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/01/esxi-41-active-directory-integration.html">great video</a> demonstrating the process. By default, an AD group names "ESX Admins" is chec</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>