V-258707

Discussion

Shrinking and wiping (erasing) 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 (those 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 this feature must be disabled. Repeated disk shrinking can make a virtual disk unavailable. The capability to wipe (erase) is available to nonadministrative users operating within the VM's guest operating system.

Check Content

For each virtual machine do the following:

From the vSphere Client, right-click the Virtual Machine and go to Edit Settings >> Advanced Parameters.

Verify the "isolation.tools.diskWiper.disable" value is set to "true".

or

From a PowerCLI command prompt while connected to the ESXi host or vCenter server, run the following command:

Get-VM "VM Name" | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name isolation.tools.diskWiper.disable

If the virtual machine advanced setting "isolation.tools.diskWiper.disable" is not set to "true", this is a finding.

If the virtual machine advanced setting "isolation.tools.diskWiper.disable" does not exist, this is not a finding.