The VMinformer Community Edition allows security professionals and those tasked with managing virtual infrastructures the ability to assess the overall security configuration of their virtual environment. Critical virtual infrastructure assets can be rapidly assessed against out of the box policy templates based on industry standards such as CIS and PCI benchmarks.

The VMinformer Community Edition is a free, single user version with most of the capabilities of VMinformer PRO.

VMinformer provides:-

• Simple deployment - installs on a laptop or workstation in minutes
• Out of the box policies - based on standard industry benchmarks
• Remediation guidance - helps identify risks to your infrastructure quickly and accurately and provides step by step fix guidance
• No cost start up security solution - provides a free entry level solution for your virtual environment

To download the community edition of the tool follow this link

Disable Copy and Paste between Guest OS and Remote Console

Allowing data to be copied between your Guest VM’s and your Host OS could create a potential security risk in allowing sensistive data to leak from VM’s and be taken outside of your organisation.  If you are creating Virtual Machine infrastructures in DMZ networks then this is particularly relevant.

To enable this feature login to your ESX Host or VC and select the particular VM you wish to change then complete the following steps: (you may need to power down the VM when making this change)

1. Login to the VC or ESX Host using the VI client
2. Select the specific VM you want to change the setting for
3. Edit the Machine settings
4. Select options then advanced
5. Then select general and then click the button configuration parameters
6. Enter the entity information and value as specified below:
isolation.tools.copy.disable  TRUE
isolation.tools.paste.disable  TRUE
isolation.tools.setGUIOptions.enable  FALSE