Plain Virtualization

If you haven't heard, VMware is implementing a new licensing on his products which will be effective 30th April 2020. This means, if you were to purchase any license prior to that, it will still have no restriction. So what is new in these licensing changes? Basically, VMware is introducing a physical core licensing to its per-CPU license. VMware software has always been licensed by per physical CPU with unlimited physical cores on that CPU. With this change, each CPU license will be limited to 32 physical cores. Will the customer be affected? Most customers, will not be affected since most servers are using Intel CPU which currently has not exceeded 36 physical cores. However, those running the latest AMD CPU, will be affected as there will be more licenses required. Here is the VMware announcement. This will apply to all VMware software. One of the questions that are commonly asked, will be if my CPU has more than 32 cores (example 48 cores) and I am using two physical C...

Recently the most talk about security measurement against the two discovered vulnerabilities has raised a lot of talks. This all started and revealed by  Google Project Zero . I have also recently shared advice from VMware support and KBs to our Singapore VMUG users during our event yesterday. Below is a summary of questions and the approach you should be doing for patching your VMware environment. Details on Spectre and Meltdown https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/01/what-are-spectre-and-meltdown-and-why-should-you-care/ https://blog.barkly.com/meltdown-spectre-patches-list-windows-update-help Technical explanation:   http://frankdenneman.nl/2018/01/05/explainer-spectre-meltdown-graham-sutherland/ Side Notes ESXi is only affected by Spectre and all patches for ESXi 5.5. and above has been released. Removed due to retracting of code instructed by Intel. Check update below. ESXi is NOT affected by Meltdown as it does not have untrusted user ac...

Few months back there were reports of Windows 2008 R2 and Solaris 10 running 64-bit experiencing BSOD or kernel panic running vSphere 5.x.  Some of my customers were also impacted by this issues.  With VMware Support, they identified that there are experiencing servers that are on Intel E5 v2 series processors. VMware was fast and release a temporary fix to use Software MMU however this is not beneficial as this increase the CPU and memory requirements on certain applications. So the server vendors with VMware and Intel must have gone through lots of testing and have release the updated KB2073791 .  The temporary fix will still applies if your server vendors does not have an updated BIOS upgrade to make some changes to resolve this issues. If you refer to page 50 in the document stated in the KB 2703791 , CA135 is the known issue as a release document from Intel.  Since a processor cannot be altered, a fixed is provided via the server vendors BIOS. Interesti...