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Tag: 6.5

Spectre/Meltdown Vulnerability – How to Patch VMware vCenter 6.5

Spectre/Meltdown Vulnerability – How to Patch VMware vCenter 6.5

As per Security Advisory VMSA-2018-0007, VMware has begun releasing virtual appliance updates to address side-channel analysis due to speculative execution vulnerabilities. One of the first virtual appliances VMware has patched is vCenter 6.5. The latest release, vCenter 6.5U1f, patches the VCSA’s Photon OS to address Spectre-1 (CVE-2018-5753) and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) vulnerabilities. Mitigations for Spectre-2 (CVE-2017-5715) are absent from the latest patch as Spectre-1 and Meltdown mitigations were ready to be released; whereas, Spectre-2 patches were still being prepared. UPDATE –…

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Install Nested ESXi 6.5 on Ravello

Install Nested ESXi 6.5 on Ravello

Recently, I had the opportunity to test a nested lab deployment on Oracle’s Ravello Cloud Service. If you are unfamiliar with Oracle’s Ravello offering, it enables you to deploy your VMware or KVM workloads on Oracle Public Cloud, AWS, or Google Cloud. Ravello seamlessly runs your environment on top of their own nested hypervisor, HVX. HVX, in turn, is run on resources provisioned by Oracle, AWS, or Google Cloud. Utilizing Ravello’s HVX hypervisor allows the underlying cloud infrastructure to behave like your traditional datacenter; thus, enabling…

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Configure vCenter High Availability

Configure vCenter High Availability

A great feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 was the ability to implement vCenter High Availability (VCHA). If you are unfamiliar with the vCenter High Availability, it is an active-passive architecture to safeguard your vCenter Server appliance from host, hardware, or application failures. How does it work? The VCHA deployment is comprised of three nodes; active, passive and witness. The active node is just that, the active vCenter Server Appliance instance. This node has two interfaces; a standard management…

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Install Windows Server 2016 on VMware

Install Windows Server 2016 on VMware

Historically, the adoption rate on major server releases is slow. With Windows Server 2016 about to hit one year in the release cycle, more organizations are gearing up to deploy the operating system in their environments. That being the case, it seemed appropriate to walk through an install of Microsoft Windows Server 2016 as the guest OS in a vSphere 6.5 environment. NOTE – Server 2016 is fully supported from ESXi 5.5 and up, as per the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Online Upgrade to ESXi 6.5 Using ESXCLi

Online Upgrade to ESXi 6.5 Using ESXCLi

A few months back, we discussed how to upgrade ESXi hosts using VMware Update Manager. However, if you do not employ VUM, hosts can also be upgraded via ESXCLi commands using an online repository. In this tutorial, we will upgrade an ESXi host from 6.0 to 6.5 using VMware Online Depot. In addition, I will discuss how to differentiate image profiles within the depot.  If you are unfamiliar with the VMware Online Depot, it’s an online repository that provides access…

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