Plain Virtualization

Many of our customers have done vulnerability assessment (VA) on vSphere ESXi and often highlighted out the vulerable items such as SHA1 and TLS 1.0, etc.  Some of it were there but not in used and we could not manually remove them such as SHA1, MD5, etc. While some of them were to support lower version such as TLS 1.1 and 1.0.  With vSphere 8, the security enhancement has made uplift to remove unwanted security bundles and as well to support only secured transport connection via TLS 1.2. On top of that, it also added daemons to now run in their own sandboxes instead of in the hypervisor world needing higher permissions which were unneeded and prone to vulnerability attacks. What is new for security is a timeout for SSH shell when enabled on ESXi host. So administrators, no longer are to leave the SSH shell connected for infinite time or even worse forgetting to disconnect and logout of the endpoint where they are connected to the ESXi shell. Lastly, if your hardware used for ...

Back in vSphere 7 there was mention of deprecation of USB and SD Card due to reliability issue of such storage disk used for ESXi installation. Often than not, even in my home lab, I always encounter these USB sticks failure causing my host to not boot up after shutting down or doing a restart. VMware has now official state the deprecation of such support starting from vSphere 8. Which means, vSphere 8.0 will be the last version to support such storage devices as ESXi installation disk. I believe most customer would have moved off USB and SD Card since vSphere mentioned previously. More servers nowadays also support SATADOM SSD which is ideally better than a normal server HDD which might be too huge and wasted for use. Do refer to this  KB  on information regarding this and I hope everyone should not be considering using any more USB or SD card.

With VMware Explore in US, vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 are both announced. However, do note that not to get confused announcement is on the release but it's not generally available. So you cannot download them till generally available. The general available date is to be 28th Oct as stated with all the announcement for all the new infrastructure offering here . vSphere 8 To give you a technical overview of vSphere 8, do check out this site . In vSphere 8, the biggest feature that was release is the support for Distributed Services Engine also known as Data Processing Unit (DPU) or SmartNICs as a hardware or as Project Monterey which was announced 2 years ago. With the initial release, only NSX services will be offloaded to the DPU. The plan was to have vSAN and ESXIO to be part of the DPU. Which then will be able to provide NSX and vSAN services to not just vSphere environment but also to all x86 servers running Windows and Linux. To find out more, try it out on HOL . Also with this relea...