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VMware offers hardware compatibility list for home labs

Crowdsourced and unofficial info for when you want to run ESXi for fun ... or when official rigs aren't right

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 9 Mar 2022 // 08:01 UTC

Vendors' hardware compatibility lists detail the kit on which they guarantee their software will work at useful levels of performance.
But what if you can't afford that kit for a home lab or other non-production project? Or have some hardware you think might do the job at work?
VMware is now offering builders of such rigs a tool to help them understand if the kit they have to hand will suffice: a Solution Designer.

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Intel creates lite version of vPro management tech

And, because sometimes less is more, extends it to Chromebooks, too

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 3 Mar 2022 // 16:01 UTC

Intel has updated its vPro PC management platform, created a less capable edition, and brought the product to Chromebooks.
The "vPro Essentials" package is aimed at SMEs and smaller IT services providers who want management tools for their PC fleets but lack the resources to tool up for enterprise-grade kit.
The Essentials package is a subset of full vPro – which is now known as vPro Enterprise. At the time of writing, Intel had not provided The Register with a list of features omitted from the Essentials package.

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Nutanix reshuffles product portfolio into bigger bundles

Plan calls for this to end in tiers

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 15 Feb 2022 // 14:01 UTC

Nutanix has rearranged its portfolio by placing different tools into newly named bundles and buckets, and creating different tiers for the new products.
If you're a Nutanix customer and don't want to change the way you interact with the company, or pay for its wares, feel free to stop reading now because current arrangements will persist if you want to carry on as you do today.
For the rest of you, Nutanix now offers five different bundles of products:

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VMware fixes vSphere release it pulled, sorts out Log4j while it's at it

Driver drama is done, new dev practices should prevent repeats, says Virtzilla

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 28 Jan 2022 // 03:27 UTC

VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.
Paul Turner, Virtzilla's veep for vSphere product management, told The Register that the source of the problem was Intel driver updates that arrived out of sync with VMware's pre-release testing program. When users adopted the new drivers – one of which had been renamed – vSphere produced errors that meant virtual server fleet managers could not sustain high availability operations.
Turner said around 30,000 customers had adopted the release, of which around eight per cent encountered the issue. That collection of around 2,400 impacted users was enough for VMware to pull the release before the other 270,000 vSphere users hit trouble. That level of potential problems, Turner admitted, was considered a sufficient threshold to justify a do-over and the embarrassment of a pulled release.

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Parallels: Purveyors of decent virtualization software... and occasionally iffy checksums

La la la, we're not listening

Richard Speed Tue 25 Jan 2022 // 14:01 UTC

For some, an MD5 checksum is the sequence of letters and numbers that shows up next to the file they want to download. For others, it's a handy pointer that the file you've downloaded is the one you were expecting.
A Register reader got in touch after noticing something a bit odd on the Parallels downloads page. The company helpfully provides the MD5 checksum for its Desktop for Mac images, but what got downloaded apparently had an entirely different value. We checked and confirmed that the DMG file linked did not have the same checksum.
This would ordinarily set off alarm bells. After all, there have been a good few examples over the years of poisoned files being sneakily deposited on servers by miscreants seeking their next victim. Could Parallels, purveyors of virtualization tech, have been similarly targeted?

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Xen and the art of hypervisor upgrades

Version 4.16 adds first look at TPM 2.0 and better big.LITTLE support

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 06:57 UTC

The Xen Project has delivered an upgrade to its hypervisor.
Version 4.16 was announced yesterday by developer and maintainer Ian Jackson, capping a nine-month effort that saw four release candidates emerge in November 2021 prior to launch.
The project's feature list for the release celebrates the following additions as the most notable inclusions:

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Cisco tells UCS owners they may have a screw loose – in the server chassis

Power supplies are screwed up because they're not all screwed in

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 1 Dec 2021 // 01:03 UTC

Cisco has warned owners of its UCS servers that they may have a screw loose. In the UCS X9508 chassis that houses their servers, that is.
A field notice issued by the company advises: "The Power Entry Module (PEM) for a small number of UCS 9508 units might not be secured in the chassis and could be pulled out when power cord is unplugged from the chassis.
"The captive screws designed to secure the PEM were not correctly tightened and some chassis were shipped with the module improperly secured."

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KVM flaw on AMD servers gave malicious VMs a route to take over the host

Vuln thankfully patched following Google Project Zero disclosure

Gareth Halfacree Wed 30 Jun 2021 // 12:26 UTC

Updated Google's Project Zero has emitted another vulnerability report, showing off a proof-of-concept exploit against the open-source KVM hypervisor that allows an attacker to escape a virtual machine on AMD-based servers – taking control of the underlying host system.
"To the best of my knowledge," Project Zero researcher Felix Wilhelm claimed of his discovery, "this is the first public write-up of a KVM guest-to-host breakout that does not rely on bugs in user space components such as QEMU."
The vulnerability, which was demonstrated through a proof-of-concept attack to launch a shell on a host system running on an AMD Epyc 7351P processor, relies on functionality exclusive to AMD chips – meaning Intel, the company's long-standing rival and current majority holder of the server market, is unaffected.

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Containers make life easier for the software vendors you buy from, and that's why they'll win

Once you can only buy the apps you need as containers, it’s game over

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 23 Jun 2021 // 12:00 UTC

Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday.
During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the embedded poll, choosing whether you're in favor or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular. It's up to our writers to convince you to vote for their side.
This week's motion is: Containers will kill virtual machines

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