Browsing Posts published in February, 2018

Reading Time: < 1 minute VMware PowerCLI 10.0.0 is the new release of PowerCLI and the first to become multi-platform: it adds support for Mac OS and Linux! Thanks to Microsoft PowerShell Core 6.0, the open-sourced version of PowerShell that’s available on a number of operating systems, from Windows to Linux to Mac OS.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Finally Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) is GA after a long period of beta. Veeam® Availability Orchestrator is design to provide organizations with a disaster recovery (DR) orchestration engine for Veeam Backup & Replication™, in order to simplify the disaster recovery plans in place, documenting, testing and executions. With VAO you can automatically create, document and test DR plans, fully-prepared for C-level executive and stakeholder signoff, proving compliance with industry regulations and audits.

Reading Time: 3 minutes RVTools is a Windows .NET application, easy to be install which uses the VI API to collect and display informations about your vSphere virtual environments. RVTools supports ESX Server 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX Server 3i, ESX Server 4i, VirtualCenter 4.x, ESX 4.x, VirtualCenter 5.0, VirtualCenter Appliance, ESX 5.0, VirtualCenter 5.5, ESX 5.5, VirtualCenter 6.0, ESX 6.0, VirtualCenter 6.5 and ESX 6.5, so all you can have (also legacy versions) in a datacenter. And it’s totally free. After 10 months from the last version, now it’s available the new Version 3.10 (February, 2018).

Reading Time: 2 minutes If you are planning to backup a Microsoft Hyper-V cluster with Veeam Backup & Replication you may have some issues during the configuration of your environment. Compared to VMware vSphere backup where are defined some Veeam proxy on Windows machines (virtual or physical), in a Hyper-V backup, each Hyper-V node act also as a Veeam proxy!

Reading Time: 3 minutes I’m very proud and honored to be invited again to the next Tech Field Day in Austin (TX). It will be the 16th edition of Tech Field Day (#TFD16), just one year after the 13th, still in Austin (and where I was also invited). I’m very excited for this event, that remains a must for all techie-people: be a delegate is a unique opportunity to meet interesting people, learn more on products and solutions and usually learn directly by the higher (technical) level of each company… All without biased discussion and always with a high technical […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware has released (on Feb, 15th) a new vCSA version: vCenter Server 6.5 U1f, with build number 7801515. This release patches the vCSA operating system (Photon OS) mainly against two vulnerabilities: bounds-check bypass (Spectre-1, CVE-2017-5753) and rogue data cache load issues (Meltdown, CVE-2017-5754). As of now, there is still no patch for branch target injection vulnerability (Spectre-2, CVE-2017-5715). VMware has also updated the security advisory dealing with all of its virtual appliances updates for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, VMSA-2018-0007. But note that VMSA-2018-0004.2 has not been updated yet, and it still report that the suggested version for […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes We are still far from a solution for the Meltdown and Spectre, considering the delay of the microcode releases and the complexity of the possible Spectre fixes… And now, some security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton have discovered new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that may be more difficult to be fixed (but also to be exploited) than the originals.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Runecast announces the new release version 1.7 of its proactive issue detection software, Runecast Analyzer. After the Meltdown and Spectre detection added in the previous releases, this latest version brings other interesting news. Runecast Analyzer is powered by the largest database of automated VMware KB articles which feed its internal archive of known issues. The interesting aspect of this tool is that it’s very easy and fast to be deployed and that it can work fully in offline mode!

Reading Time: 6 minutes The mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre issues have involved a combination of different type of fixes: some software based, such as Microsoft and Linux versions of the “kernel page table isolation” protection, but also fome hardware based, like the Intel’s microcode updates (part that is still missing in most cases). Both type of patches can cause performance overheads and have some kind of impact on your environment. But how can you estimate it (before apply the patches) and how can you measure it (when the patches have been applied)?

Reading Time: 2 minutes When you add a Veeam proxy to the Veeam Backup infrastructure, in some cases you can have an error message like this: “Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$” And the proxy is not added to the infrastructure. There can be different reason, but the most common case occour when you have proxyes that are “workgroup only” and when you are using dedicated local accounts, and not the “Administrator” one. And you have Windows Server 2012 or later.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Uila has a very interesting product that provide a holistic full stack monitoring and visualization of an entire infrastructure from the hardware to the applications and services, end-to-end. Uila provides a non-disruptive and scalable application auto-discovery solution for over 3000 applications and protocols with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology and automatically correlates any application performance issues with underlying network, storage and compute performance to get to root-cause.

Reading Time: 8 minutes In June 2017, a team constituted of independent researchers, university research labs, and some of Google’s Project Zero members and cyberus technology discovered two security vulnerabilities enabled by the widespread use of speculative execution in most of the CPU. The problem was also independently discovered by other researchers, at about the same time. These vulnerabilities, called Meltdown and Spectre, were made public in January 2018. Meltdown and Spectre are critical vulnerabilities existing in several modern CPU: these hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. Meltdown and Spectre can affect personal […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes Linux Kernel 4.15 has been released on 28 Jan 2018 and, thanks to the entire Linux Kernel development team, this release contains the latest code to deal with Meltdown and Spectre issues and minize the related risks. The Kernel is the core code in the operating system managing low level tasks. In the update both vulnerabilities are explicitly addressed.And the interesting aspect is that the performance are not so bad! There are infact three instinct vulnerabilities identified, one Meltdown and two variations of Spectre (known as v1 and v2). Kernel 4.15 actually address only Meltdown and […]

© 2023-2011 vInfrastructure Blog | Disclaimer & Copyright