Output Normalization and Compliance IDs - VMware Edition

Change Summary:

In an effort to normalize the output from the compliance plugins, and provide a consistent identifier for the output, we are releasing a patch to the VMware compliance plugins that provides fixes for the following:

• ID generation is more consistent between audits.
• All results should have a policy value reported.
• The majority of results should have actual value or error reported. The exception to this is policies that use a "report" check type.
• Default variables are updated in custom audit uploads.
• Debug log is more verbose with the description and result of each check, and wrapped with a start and end time.

Potential Impacts:

Any customers that rely on exact content matches of actual values by using third party tools or custom audit files may have failed results following the update. This would include customers that use the known good functionality from tools that provide baseline or gold image auditing.

Target Release Date:

December 20, 2021

Additional Notes:

In the upcoming quarters we will be releasing more detailed updates to each compliance plugin.