Reading Time: 3 minutes Meltdown and Spectre remediations can imply not only performance degradation, but also some management issues. For example in how EVC works as described in VMware KB 52085 (Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigation for Branch Target injection). An ESXi host that is running a patched vSphere hypervisor with updated microcode will see new CPU features that were not previously available. These new features will be exposed to all Virtual Hardware Version 9+ VMs that are powered-on by that host. Because these virtual machines now see additional CPU features, vMotion to an ESXi host lacking the microcode or hypervisor […]
