Exploring the Effectiveness of Approaches to Discovering and Acquiring Virtualized Servers on ESXi

As businesses continue to move to virtualized environments, investigators need updated techniques to acquire virtualized servers. These virtualized servers contain a plethora of relevant data and may hold proprietary software and databases that are relatively impossible to recreate. Before an acquisition, investigators sometimes rely on the host administrators to provide them with network topologies and server information. This paper will demonstrate tools and techniques to conduct server and network discovery in a virtualized environment and how to leverage the software used by administrators to acquire virtual machines hosted on vSphere and ESXi.