My Notes on VMware Products

Short/quick notes about VMware products : ESX, ESXi, vCenter, vSphere/client.

ESX/ESXi

• Both are hypervisor that allowsus to manage VM on physcal host.
• ESXi operates independently from general purpose OS. Thus simplifies management (Linux-based consoles), better security, and smaller footprint (32MB).
• ESX must be installed on top a general purpose OS (Windows or Linux).
  
• A virtual representation of the processing and memory resources of a physical machine runnign ESXi is kwnon as a host.
• Two or more ESXi can be grouped into a cluster for resource pools management.
  

VMware vCenter Server

• Can be installed as virtural machine on top of ESXi server.
  
• Allows for centralized management of all virtual infrastructure : hosts and VMs.
• Allows to optimize routine operations on large-scale infrastructure.
• Running on Photon OS, Windows OS (discontinued) or Linux-based appliance.
  
• Allow single sign-on, inventory (VMs, hosts, datastores, networks) search, notification, and host profile configurations.
• Scalability: run up to 2000 hosts and 35000 VMs.
• Enterprise features : vMotion, VMware High Availability, Vmware Update Manager, Vmware Distrubuted Resource Scheduler (DSR).
• RBAC, performance monitoring and
  

 vSphere and vSphere client/HTML5

• vSphere is a suite that contains ESX, ESXi, vCenter, vSphere client, and used as a modern software-defined data center (SDDC).
  
• vSphere client/HTML5 - used to access ESXi (small env) and vCenter (large env) for management.
• vSphere client is replaced by HTML5-based vSphere in vSphere 6.7
  

 Links:

• https://www.mustbegeek.com/difference-between-vsphere-esxi-and-vcenter/
• https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vmware-esxi-vs-vsphere-vs-vcenter-key-differences/
  

Show Kenna Connector Status

While working on Kenna data set, it is largely depends on the input from vulnerability scanning system. Sometimes, the data upload is delayed due to the Kenna connector is taking too long to upload the data.

Thus, I just created a python script that allow me to check the Kenna connector sync status.

List Users in Kenna

I've been using KennaSecurity for one year. Then I found that something strange with KennaSecurity GUI. 

When you try to list users in Kenna, you can't find yourself in the list even you are administrator.

Thus, I create a simple ruby script that help me to list all the users, including myself. ;)