
Obligatory...
"It's Dead, Jim"
In around 2013 Citrix stopped trying to keep up with VMware and Microsoft in the server virtualisation market. The company therefore slowed development of its XenServer hypervisor, but kept it alive and suggested it as a fine underpinning for its own products –especially for virtual desktops – but not as the foundations of a …
I had a big No-oooooo! moment there until I twigged it was just Citrix's layered thing.
(Removing functionality as an "up"grade? They've gone full Apple.)
I used to hammer Xen a few years back when I was #2 tech guy in an ISP + Managed Services Provider. It's ugly as hell but MAN is it impressive.
VMs running at a 3% penalty to the bare metal.
*THREE* percent!!!
I did XEN before Citrix thought it was a good idea, compiled the kernels, jumped the hoops.
A bit later it dawned on me, as it should on any thinking body in this cursed industry: Virtualising, massive amounts of closed source binaries (aka Windows), ad infinitum, is an completely idiotic and a massive "WORK HARDER NOT SMARTER" waste of resources!
Do the applications right instead! You fucking simpletons!
PS: Containers are based on the same idiocy, with a slightly smaller footprint (in the short run)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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:
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."
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.
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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