News

• New vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 Skylake Best Practices got recently published and are available for Skylake customers running SAP HANA on VMware vSphere.
• SAP HANA 1.0 and 2.0 Scale-UP and Scale-Out deployments are   now supported with vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 on Intel Skylake based server systems. Details SAP note 2393917.
• VMware Tools Version 10.3.0 Recall and Workaround Recommendations ( 57796 ). VMware has been made aware of issues in some vSphere ESXi 6.5 configurations with the VMXNET3 network driver for Windows that was released with VMware Tools 10.3.0. As a result, VMware has recalled the VMware Tools 10.3.0 release. This release has been removed from the VMware Downloads page
• Latest information on a new Intel speculative-execution vulnerability CVE-2018-3646  August 14th 2018
  Intel has posted details on a new class of CPU speculative-execution vulnerabilities known collectively as “L1 Terminal Fault” that can occur on current and past Intel processors. 
  “L1 Terminal Fault” is an Intel microprocessor vulnerability which impacts the hypervisors. It may allow a malicious VM running on a given CPU core to effectively infer contents of the hypervisor's or another VM's privileged information residing concurrently in the same core's L1 Data cache. Because current Intel processors share the physically-addressed L1 Data cache across both logical processors of a Hyperthreading (HT) enabled core, indiscriminate simultaneous scheduling of software threads on both logical processors creates the potential for further information leakage. CVE-2018-3646 has two currently known attack vectors which will be referred to here as "Sequential Context" and "Concurrent Context".

• Sequential-context attack vector: a malicious VM can potentially infer recently accessed L1 data of a previous context (hypervisor thread or other VM thread) on either logical processor of a processor core.
• Concurrent-context attack vector: a malicious VM can potentially infer recently accessed L1 data of a concurrently executing context (hypervisor thread or other VM thread) on the other logical processor of the hyperthreading-enabled processor core.

     VMware has developed a patch and mitigation strategy. You can find all the relevant information in VMware KB 55636.
     For the relevant security advisory information, check VMSA_2018_0021.

• SAP support for vSphere 6.7, please read SAP note “1409608 – Virtualization on Windows” and SAP note “1122387 – Linux: SAP Support in virtualized environments” for further details.
• Like most other vendors, VMware has released patches for the recently identified vulnerabilities in microprocessors code named Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715) and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754). Please see VMware Advisory page  https://www.vmware.com/us/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0002.html  for further instructions, in particular to the Spectre vulnerability, whereas ESXi and related VMware products are not affected by Meltdown vulnerability, as stated in following blog  https://blogs.vmware.com/security/2018/01/vmsa-2018-0002.html .