TAM Lab – Enabling MFA in vSphere 7

Security within IT has always been important. Over the past couple of years, security has moved from important to critical and IT departments are under the microscope to make sure they are secure.

The vSphere platform leverages vCenter Server as the primary point of administration for virtualized workloads. As vSphere has evolved, the authentication components needed to evolve too. With the release of vSphere 7, a powerful integration was added: Identity Federation with Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).

With this integration, vSphere 7 steps back from authentication, handing off to ADFS and opening up amazing opportunities to increase the security of the vSphere platform. Environments with ADFS can leverage any integration that exists with the service and extend it to vSphere.

One of the best examples of this is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Historically, the only MFA options for vSphere were RSA and SmartCards. While useful for some environments, there was complexity, cost, and other considerations that did not make sense for most other environments. With vSphere 7, any MFA provider that can integrate with ADFS can now provide services to vSphere. Talk about powerful!

TAM Lab 113 - Enabling MFA in vSphere 7 explores the architecture and authentication flow; running through example MFA integrations using Duo and Ping. Watch along as we get our hands dirty and configure a vSphere 7 environment to authenticate with MFA! We will be setting up ADFS, changing authentication methods for vSphere, configuring MFA integrations, and testing authentication. Plus, as a bonus, we dig into some considerations for PowerCLI authentication as well. We have divided TAM Lab 113 into four easy to watch sections, check out part one below.

Click here to view the entire series of videos for TAM Lab 113.

vSphere 7's integration with ADFS provides greater opportunities for IT teams to better secure their environments. Check out TAM Lab 113 and other resources from VMware to help identify the opportunity for your environment and see what makes sense.

TAM Labs are created by VMware Technical Account Managers. Want to learn more about TAM Labs, check out this blog.