The VMware vCenter comes with several privileges grouped in Roles by default. The privileges and Roles allow the administrator to configure a granular security policy defining individual user rights. On the vCenter there are three system roles as follows: No Access Read-Only Administrator The system roles are permanent. there is no way to modify them. The No Access and Read-Only roles are very useful for restricting user access quickly. The six default role samples are as follows: Virtual Machine Power User Virtual Machine User Resource Pool Administrator VMware Consolidated Backup User Datastore Consumer Network Administrator While it is possible use.

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The Lockdown Mode is a nice feature of VMware ESXi. When an ESXi host is in Lockdown Mode, it will only perform operations coming from the vSphere Server that is controlling it. vSphere Clients and other sources won’t “work”. The ESXi Shell, the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) and SSH won’t be affected. Lockdown Mode has been created to offer improved security in complex virtual environment. It’s really easy to enable the Lockdown Mode from the DCUI.

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VMware vSphere is a very flexible platform, making you able to manage a group of virtual machines and resource pools in a single entity named vApp. Let’s think about a web application running on a VM. The application also needs a database and other resources running on differente virtual machines. From a service point of view, all the virtual machines are part of the same entity and that’s why vApp exists.

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Cloning virtual machines is a common task in virtualized environments, so common VMware created a different type of virtual machine to be used as a Template (and named Template). The difference between a VM and a Template is simple: you can’t power on a Template so you can’t modify it without converting it back to a virtual machine. When a VM is converted to a template its .vmx file become a .vmtx file. It’s pretty easy and quick to convert a VM to a template with VMWare vSphere Web Client, just follows these steps.

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USB passthrough is a very useful feature that allows to add to a virtual machine residing on a VMware ESXi host USB devices connected to the host itself. Usually USB passthrough is used to connect security dongles or storage USB devices to virtual machines. The USB devices must be connected only with a VM at time. In order to assign them to other VMs you need to perform a disconnection. The configuration is extremely simple and involves just a few steps.

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