Reading Time: 5 minutes 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 computers, mobile devices, server and several cloud services. Actually, the only way to minimize those security risks is to patch your operating systems and the hypervisor level (if you are using virtual machines).
Reading Time: 6 minutes After few weeks of the recent Intel CPU security bug, not yet closed (considering that affect also the recent Skylake family), there are new threads on the CPU. 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 computers, mobile devices, server and several cloud services. Depending on the bug, the affected CPU are Intel processors (since 1995!), some AMD CPUs, and several ARM-based Samsung and Qualcomm system-on-chips used for mobile phones.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Runecast Analyzer is a proactive issue detection software for VMware vSphere environments, powered by the largest database of automated VMware KB articles which feed its internal archive of known issues. It’s based on a virtual appliance (VA) that you can deploy in your environment (or also on a different environment) to check your vSphere (and also vSAN and NSX) environments.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The 2018 was the year of the CPU related threats, starting with the Meltdown and Spectre bugs affecting several processors, but with most of issues related to Intel based CPU. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning and many other bugs were discovered later. And we’re probably just at the tip of the iceberg.
Reading Time: 2 minutes With VMware vSAN you can use VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM) to update all the software part, but it can also be useful to manage some hardware related updates. Usually you have to check BIOS version (for example for Spectre and Meltdown bugs), but also the other firmware.
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware vSphere 5.5 is really close to its End of Support, that will mean no more updates and possible limited support from VMware. The End of General Support for vSphere 5.5 is September 19, 2018. To maintain your full level of support and subscription services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 6.5, or to a newer version.
Reading Time: 9 minutes With all those Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, … bugs that affect several CPU, you may be interested in what can be the overall performance impact for all the related patches. There isn’t a simple answer, because it really varies by the processor vendor (Intel CPUs are more affected than AMD CPUs), probably also by CPU the family, for sure by the type of workloads (CPU bound workloads will be more affected, but it depends also on which instructions are used), … but also the type of environment.
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