During the replacement of some VMware ESXi hosts at a customer, I discovered a recurrent failure of the vSphere Distributed Switch health checks. A VLAN and MTU mismatch was reported. On the physical side, the ESXi hosts were connected to two HPE 5820 switches, that were configured as an IRF stack. Inside the VMware bubble, the hosts were sharing a vSphere Distributed Switch.
The switch ports of the old ESXi hosts were configured as Hybrid ports.
In addition to my shortcut blog post about Meltdown and Spectre with regard of Microsoft Windows, VMware ESXi and vCenter, and HPE ProLiant, I would like to add some additional information about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler.
When we talk about Meltdown and Spectre, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities:
CVE-2017-5715 (branch target injection) CVE-2017-5753 (bounds check bypass) CVE-2017-5754 (rogue data cache load) CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 are known as “Spectre”, CVE-2017-5754 is known as “Meltdown”.
Change History 01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004 01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs 01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates 01-18-2018: Updated VMware section 01-24-2018: Updated HPE section 01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section 02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section 02-20-2018: Updated HPE section 04-17-2018: Updated HPE section
Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far.
Open network ports in offices, waiting rooms and entrance halls make me curious. Sometimes I want to plugin a network cable, just to see if I get an IP address. I know many companies that does not care about network access control. Anybody can plugin any device to the network. When talking with customers about network access control, or port security, I often hear their complains about complexity. It’s too complex to implement, to hard to administrate.
TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue.
Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention:
Advisory: (Revision) VMware - HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt
And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article:
ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers
Two 3PAR StoreServs running in a Peer Persistence setup lost the connection to the Quorum Witness appliance. The appliance is an important part of a 3PAR Peer Persistence setup, because it acts as a tie-breaker in a split-brain scenario.
While analyzing this issue, I saw this message in the 3PAR Management Console:
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
In addition to that, the customer got e-mails that the 3PAR StoreServ arrays lost the connection to the Quorum Witness appliance.
Some days ago, my colleague Claudia and I started to work on a new project: A greenfield deployment consisting of some well known building blocks: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, HPE Networking (now Aruba) and VMware vSphere. Nothing new for us, because we did this a couple times together. But this led us to the idea, to automate some tasks. Especially the configuration of the HPE ProLiants: Changing BIOS settings and configuring the iLO.
The HPE OfficeConnect 1920 switch series is designed for SMBs. The switch is perfect for small environments, that require features like VLANs, routing or 802.1x. This switch is smart-managed, so it has “only” a web interface and only a limited CLI.
I have two switches in my lab: A 1910-8G and the successor, a 1920-24G. Although the device supports IPv6, it doesn’t support SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) by default. The switch does not send router advertisements (RA).
3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9.
Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.
In my last post (Routed Port vs. Switch Virtual Interface (SVI)), I have mentioned a consequence of using routed ports to interconnect access and core switches:
You have to route the traffic on the access switches.
Routing on the network access, the edge of the network, is not a question of performance. It is more of a management issue. Depending on the size of your network, and the number of subnets, you have to deal with lots of routes.
