VM : disable-disk-shrinking-shrink

Information

Shrinking a virtual disk reclaims unused space in it. If there is empty space in the disk, this process reduces the amount of space the virtual disk occupies on the host drive. Normal users and processes-that is, users and processes without root or administrator privileges-within virtual machines have the capability to invoke this procedure. However, if this is done repeatedly, the virtual disk can become unavailable while this shrinking is being performed, effectively causing a denial of service. In most datacenter environments, disk shrinking is not done, so you should disable this feature by setting the parameters listed in Table 9. Repeated disk shrinking can make a virtual disk unavailable. Capability is available to nonadministrative users in the guest.

Solution

Set isolation.tools.diskShrink.disable to true in the virtual machine configuration file.

See Also

https://www.vmware.com/files/xls/hardeningguide-vsphere5-5-ga-released.xlsx

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-7

Plugin: VMware

Control ID: 2a83d76a971c1f97ef71fd729c0b740553efde702534c2bef5ce6d0960c0523d