Fun post: Be more than the highest version ... of course sometimes ;)

 It's a little funny and strange matter that I suddenly met. I installed a security hotfix: ESXi670-202103001 (177000523) on one of my ESXi hosts. Then after the successful reboot, I wanted to check its version with the existing official version listed in VMware KB2143832, but I saw it has a higher version than the top listed version for ESXi v6.7(EP18). But today when I want to post, It has been updated ...

So sometimes it's not bad to be updated more than mentioned versions :D

Cluster Remediation settings: Suspend to memory

 One of the newest features in vSphere 7.0 U2 is "Suspend to memory (STM) " which is very useful during maintenance operations and can cause update operation is done so much faster while using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) especially when you need a lot of time to move the virtual machines to another host, or if there is not enough space for migrating them. Because generally in many cases of upgrading ESXi hosts, you will encounter these two bottlenecks: time duration for temporary migration and not-enough computing resources on destination.

So STM can be helpful in a similar situation, however, you should know this feature have some restrictions, like requiring to enable the "Quick Boot" feature. If you need to know more about the limitation, requirements, and best practices of this feature, please check the following link:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81555

However there is a lot of restriction in hardware support for STM, and based on KB82558 only a few server models can handle this (In date of writing this post): HPE Proliant DL380 G10 and DELL PowerEdge R740 family.

 Also, Niels Hagoort wrote a brief about the STM feature in the VMware blog:

https://core.vmware.com/blog/make-esxi-upgrades-faster-suspend-memory

A Future Defined by Cloud: Challenges and Capabilities

 

 Hello guys. Today is a very important day, because it's the first day of spring and based on the Persian solar calendar it's the first day of a new century: 14th century! Then I decide to introduce a new Cloud-related event of VMware on March 31^st (10 days later, so if you mind and don't wanna miss it, please save it in your scheduled events).

https://www.vmware.com/app-cloud-event.html?src=em_602d770dd929b&cid=7012H000001Ysn5

Also, I attached list of speakers in the attached screen and hope you enjoy and learn more and more about the VMware App and Cloud Transformation.

💚💚Happy Nowruz All💚💚

 

VMSA-2021-0002

 Around two weeks ago VMware announced a new series of RCE (Remote Code Executions) about some of products, especially two primary components of vSphere in versions of 6.5, 6.7, 7.0: ESXi and vCenter Server, and also Cloud Foundation (3x, 4.x). Three CVEs has been published for these security vulnerabilities and most of them is related to the HTML5 version of vSphere client (HTTPS:443). Because it will give the attackers unrestricted access to execute commands. To read more about these security breaches (CVE-2021-21972, CVE-2021-21973, CVE-2021-21974) you can read the VMSA-2021-0002.

In the following I mentioned a brief of their known targets:

21972: Let the attacker execute an RCE with unrestricted privileges on the VCSA via accessing port 443 on the network.

21973: Let to attacker send a POST request to VCSA HTML5 on port 443, and lead to information disclosure because of an SSRF (Server Side Request Forgery) vulnerability.

21974: Grant the attacker access to the ESXi via RCE on port 427 to trigger the heap-overflow issue in OpenSLP service.

Also for more information about another vulnerability about the vSphere Replication, read the VMSA-2021-0001

 

VMware Horizon View - Part1: VDI features

In the first part of the VDI Tutorial, I will review its architecture and talk a little about each part of VMware Horizon View: Client types, Connection Server, Replica, Composer, and so on.