There is more information that Nessus is able to audit and report on that is useful to VMware administrators. Tenable vCenter/vSphere Best Practices Configuration Auditīy interfacing with the VMware API, Nessus is able to go beyond the hardening guidelines provided by VMware. The compliance auditing file uses the guides from VMware and provides you with a report to see how your configuration stacks up. This compliance audit represents the industry-standard resource when it comes to hardening VMware infrastructure. The audit files are: VMware-hardening Compliance Audit audit files provide more than twice the number of checks (over 200+) currently available in VMware's compliance checking tool. Three new customizable compliance auditing files are now available on the Tenable Support Portal. Comprehensive Configuration and Compliance Auditing for VMware Supported versions are ESXi 4.x/5.x and vCenter 4.x/5.x. Tenable has developed APIs for both ESXi (the interface available free of charge to manage virtual machines (VMs) on ESX/ESXi) and vCenter (an add-on product available from VMware at some cost to manage one or more ESX/ESXi servers). Tenable has now implemented new checks using the VMware SOAP API (which is already being used by existing plugins to pull information about VMware systems).

SSH has been disabled by default on newer versions of ESX/ESXi. However, the methods used SSH credentials to log into the VMware platform and perform the audit checks. Nessus contained the ability to perform compliance audits against VMware ESX for some time.

How to use nessus in vmware