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Trend Micro Discovers Linux Based Malware That Targets VMware Servers

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 29, 2022 by itnerd

Bad news for those who run VMware, as if they needed any more bad news that’s VMware related. Researchers at Trend Micro have discovered a Linux based malware that targets VMware ESXi servers:

We recently observed multiple Linux-based ransomware detections that malicious actors launched to target VMware ESXi servers, a bare-metal hypervisor for creating and running several virtual machines (VMs) that share the same hard drive storage. We encountered Cheerscrypt, a new ransomware family, that has been targeting a customer’s ESXi server used to manage VMware files.

Here’s why this is dangerous. It makes the job of ransomware attackers far easier because they can encrypt the VMware ESXi server and then encrypt every guest VM it contains. In effect it’s one shot pwnage for a threat actor. And that can be catastrophic for an enterprise. There’s really no specific mitigation strategies that are offered up by Trend Micro, but I have one. Have multiple backups and snapshots and store them off line so that they can’t get pwned. Also do regular test recoveries because Backus mean nothing if you can’t use them to recover from something like this.

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VMware Vulnerability Inner Workings Shown In Horizon3.ai “Deep Dive”

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 26, 2022 by itnerd

Horizon3.ai has just published VMware Authentication Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2022-22972) Technical Deep Dive. The detailed analysis of the inner workings of a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access, Identity Manager and vRealize Automation products (CVE-2022-22972). This vulnerability allows an attacker to login as any known local user.

Horizon3.ai Exploit Developer James Horseman notes in his summary: “CVE-2022-22972 is a relatively simple Host header manipulation vulnerability. Motivated attackers would not have a hard time developing an exploit for this vulnerability.” Horseman cites results of a Shodan.io search indicating “the healthcare, education industry, and state government sectors all seem to be a fair amount of the types of organizations that have exposures – putting them at larger risk for current and future exploitation.”

If you haven’t done so already, you should apply the updates that are available to mitigate this vulnerability.

The list of affected products are: 

  • VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access)
  • VMware Identity Manager (vIDM)
  • VMware vRealize Automation (vRA)
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager

There is also a workaround detailed here for those who can’t patch all the things immediately.

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Horizon3.ai Reproduces A Critical VMware Vulnerability That Grants Administrative Access

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 24, 2022 by itnerd

The attack team at Horizon3.ai has successfully reproduced CVE-2022-22972 affecting multiple VMware products. The vulnerability allows malicious actors to gain administrative access to VMware Workspace ONE Access, Identity Manager and vRealize Automation. The fact that this was reproduced by Horizon3.ai is good for Horizon3.ai, but bad for anyone using the affected products as that means that threat actors can do the same. Then they can weaponize this.

Zach Hanley, Chief Attack Engineer, Horizon3.ai:

“Last week VMware released VMware Security Advisory – 0014 which details a critical vulnerability, CVE-2022-22972, which allows a remote attacker to bypass authentication for VMware Workspace ONE, vIDM, and vRA. This vulnerability can lead to attackers gaining administrative rights on the VMware applications and may also lead to root level access on the appliances if chained with CVE-2022-22973. 

“Coinciding with VMware’s security advisory, CISA announced an Emergency Directive mandating that all government agencies patch or mitigate affected products by May 23, 2022. This 5 day remediation window was deemed necessary given the critical nature of the applications and rapid weaponization of previous CVEs. Currently, no other proof-of-concepts have been announced and no reports of in-the-wild exploitation have been noted by threat intelligence organizations. 

“A quick search on Shodan.io for the affected VMware applications returns a pretty low count of organizations that expose them to the internet. Of note, the healthcare, education industry, and state government all seem to be a fair amount of the types of organizations that have exposures – putting them at larger risk for current and future exploitation.

“Organizations should address these issues by immediately following the guidance within the VMware Security Advisory. 

“We will likely be releasing the technical details at the end of this week. The technical details will include analyzing the patch to understand how an attacker may have previously abused this code path.

“Given that it took us about a week to develop a PoC, we fully expect motivated attackers to have already developed a PoC and began exploiting it. We also plan on releasing a minimal PoC at the same time.”

This issue received a fix last Wednesday as described above. I strongly advise that if you are running the affected VMware products, that you patch everything immediately if you haven’t already. The list of affected products are:

  • VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access)
  • VMware Identity Manager (vIDM)
  • VMware vRealize Automation (vRA)
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager

There is also a workaround detailed here for those who can’t patch all the things immediately.

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Prophet Spider Is Exploiting Log4j Vulnerabilities In VMware Horizon

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 26, 2022 by itnerd

Initial access broker group Prophet Spider has been found exploiting the Log4j vulnerability in VMware Horizon, according to a new report from researchers with BlackBerry Research & Intelligence and Incident Response teams. Given how widely used VMware Horizon is used, this is a major threat.

Jorge Orchilles, CTO, SCYTHE had this to say:

“Initial Access Brokers leverage any opportunity to gain access to an organization. They must maintain that access as they sell it and hand it off to the buyer. Today the exploit being used is for Log4j, tomorrow it will be another. As defenders, we want to be able to detect and respond to the inevitable exploit that will one day break through our protection. Regardless of the exploit, we can detect and respond to what happens after by testing, training, and improving our people, process, and security controls. This is an ever evolving field, we must collaborate to stay ahead of the threats.”

This is the key thing:

The exact number of applications (and the various versions) affected by these vulnerabilities may never be fully known. Although VMware released a patch and mitigation guidance in December 2021 in response to the vulnerability, many implementations remain unpatched, leaving them susceptible to exploitation.

Thus if you haven’t got about patching, you may want to hop to it ASAP seeing as this is being exploited.

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Smart Technology Makes The New Istanbul Airport Intelligent & Efficient Thanks To Cisco, Microfocus, DellEmc, Hitachi & Vmware

Posted in Commentary with tags , , , , on October 18, 2019 by itnerd

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Smart technology is dramatically changing the way airports are run and enhancing the passenger experience.

The newly opened Istanbul Airport, the hub for the ever-expanding Turkish Airlines, unveiled earlier this year, covers 76 million square meters or 18,780 acres. Once complete, it will be able to handle 200 million passengers a year and be the biggest airport by passenger traffic (by comparison, Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, is currently the busiest airport with 107 million passengers a year).

Behind the success of this airport, in large part, is technology developed with industry leaders such as Cisco, Microfocus, DellEmc, Hitachi and Vmware.

Here are some highlights:

New systems:

  • This airport is the first TIER 3 intelligent Airport Data Center in the world, certified by Uptime Institute, the global data center authority.
  • An Airport Collaborative Decision Making system has been implemented, where stakeholders in the aviation sector (airport operators, airlines, ground handling companies, state authorities) can share the data they have and allow for more accurate decisions by looking at the same operational picture.
  • A level-4 Airport Surface Movement and Guidance Control System has been implemented to help keep airport ground operations safe and fast, especially at low visibility conditions.
  • A biometric integrated passport control system was developed in coordination with Turkish Police IT Department. The system is capable of validating passengers who hold a Turkish Passport, by using fingerprint and face recognition biometric features.
  • A new system called the Passenger Flow Monitoring (PFM) will monitor passenger flow through various checkpoints such as passport control in order to segregate land side/airside passage. This will allow passengers to be directed in a more intelligent manner.
  • A technology driven bag-drop system enables passengers to check-in their luggage quickly and easily. Having checked in online or at the airport kiosks, passengers weigh their bags and use their boarding pass at the self-bag-tag kiosk located in the airport terminal to generate a label for their bag.
  • Waiting time at baggage carousels will be shortened. The 42 kilometers long baggage system, holding the capacity to process over 28,880 pieces of luggage per hour, ensures an uninterrupted passenger experience by bringing down the baggage waiting period to a minimum level.
  • The EBS system (early baggage storage system) with a capacity of 10,800 pieces of luggage makes it possible to store early arriving baggage, thereby making Istanbul Airport use the latest baggage store technology.

Artificial intelligence:

  • Biometric screening and advanced passport control has been integrated to help passengers check in quicker.
  • A range of software has been developed from mobile applications to boost airport security systems to an airline messaging platform and a joint decision-making system.
  • The airport is also working on the first airport data center in the world, the first virtual tower application in Turkey, domestic robots and unmanned passenger transfer vehicles.

Robotics:

Istanbul Airport will have Humanoid Infotainment Robots to:

  • Meet and greet passengers and offer general information about the Airport with audio-visual guidance
  • Provide passengers, using their boarding pass, specific information about flight status, gate numbers, check-in desks, etc.

 

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Review: VMware Fusion 11

Posted in Products with tags on October 18, 2018 by itnerd

VMware has released VMware Fusion 11 which is the latest version of their virtualization product for macOS in the last couple of weeks. Last year’s VMware Fusion 10 impressed me so much that I switched to it from Parallels Desktop as my personal choice for virtualization on my Mac. Thus I was very interested to see what VMware brought to the table in version 11.

Let me get straight to the point. If you’re looking for a bunch of new and cool features, you’re not going to see that here. And that’s not a bad thing as from what I can tell, VMware Fusion 11 is meant to enhance what was already a solid platform and bring it in line with other VMware virtualization offerings. And that’s not a bad thing as one strength that VMware Fusion has is that it can pull from their other virtualization offerings to make itself better for Mac users. Plus you can integrate VMware Fusion into a larger VMware environment with ease as it fully supports that use case with ease. Having said that it does have a bunch of improvements which include the following:

  • macOS Mojave compatibility
  • Support for the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro models. Including TouchBar support.
  • Support for Windows 10 1803, Ubuntu 18.04, macOS 10.14, Fedora 28, RHEL 7.5, CentOS 7.5, Debian 9.5, OpenSuse Leap 15.0, FreeBSD 11.2, ESXi 6.7
  • Support for Apple Metal and Microsoft Direct X 10.1
  • Security fixes and architectural changes have been made to mitigate threats like Spectre and Meltdown.
  • Support for virtual NVMe drives on Macs that have those drives.

The last item is particularly interesting as NVMe drives offer performance advantages over regular SATA drives. Thus if your Mac has an NVMe drive in it, this will make your VMs run significantly faster. The second last item was a chief motivator for me to move to VMware Fusion last year as my previous virtualization product didn’t offer those fixes.  Support for Metal is great because that is another way that VMware has increased the performance of the product. And while I welcome support for Direct X 10.1, support for Direct X 11 or 12 would be most welcome for the game players out there. Other than that,   I did notice some improvements from a disk and graphics perspective after I upgraded and started testing my VMs.

One really cool feature is that VMware Fusion 11 includes an Applications Menu which sits in the Mac’s main Menu Bar at the top of the screen for easy access. This menu allows you to quickly browse and select your VMs and also to control individual VMs even when they’re not running. The menu can be used to start, shut down or pause a VM, or to switch viewing modes on the Mac desktop. It’s really handy.

Here’s the bottom line. This is an evolutionary upgrade that will appeal to a variety of users. Whether you are a home user or an enterprise that runs other VMware products, there’s value in upgrading to VMware Fusion 11. It is available starting at $79.99 USD for new customers and $49.99 USD as an upgrade. And don’t forget there is a Pro version which is $159.99 USD for new customers and $119 USD as an upgrade.

 

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VMware Advances Networking for the Digital Era with the Virtual Cloud Network

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 1, 2018 by itnerd

VMware today outlined its vision for the future of networking, and unveiled the Virtual Cloud Network. The Virtual Cloud Network will enable organizations to create a digital business fabric for connecting and securing applications, data, and users across the entire network in a hyper-distributed world.

To deliver on this vision, VMware announced the VMware NSX networking and security portfolio to enable consistent, pervasive connectivity and security for apps and data across software-defined data centre, branch, cloud, and telco environments. Global leaders in digital transformation and technology innovation demonstrated support for VMware’s vision and NSX portfolio launch (see below).

The NSX portfolio includes investments of resources to deliver new capabilities that include:

  • VMware NSX SD-WAN integration with VMware NSX Data Center and VMware NSX Cloud
  • NSX Cloud support for applications running in Microsoft Azure
  • NSX Data Center support for containerized cloud-native and bare metal applications
  • Telco/NFV and networking performance optimizations for distributed workloads in NSX Data Center

Virtual Cloud Network: A New Network Approach for the Next 20 Years

Organizations are embarking on digital transformation to create better experiences for customers, clients, and employees, and drive better business outcomes. These efforts introduce a new level of networking and security complexity as organizations move from centralized data centres, to hyper distributed applications and centres of data at the edge.

The Virtual Cloud Network will enable businesses to connect, better secure, and optimize the delivery of applications and data in an era when a majority of workloads exist outside the data centre. With a Virtual Cloud Network, customers will be able to create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that can deliver services to applications and data, wherever they are located. The Virtual Cloud Network will operate at global scale from edge to edge, and deliver consistent, pervasive connectivity and security for apps and data independent of underlying physical infrastructure or location. The Virtual Cloud Network will enable organizations to streamline the journey to digital business, and take full advantage of digital transformation, by unlocking value from today’s current networking technologies and significantly reducing network complexity.

VMware Advances Business Transformation with Networking and Security in Software

The VMware NSX networking and security portfolio provides a common operating environment to connect, secure and operate a Virtual Cloud Network. The portfolio will include new and enhanced capabilities for data centre, branch, cloud and telco environments, and will advance support for traditional and modern application frameworks. With the VMware NSX portfolio, customers will be able to manage consistent networking and security across private data centres, AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud.

Network Virtualization: VMware NSX Data Center is the industry’s most widely deployed network virtualization platform for the enterprise data centre, adopted by more than 4,500 customers globally. NSX Data Center enables customers to design, build, and operate next-generation policy driven data centres that connect, secure, and automate traditional and modern applications, and help protect applications and data through security that is an intrinsic part of the infrastructure.

With the latest update, NSX Data Center will include new container and bare metal capabilities that will be able to provide consistent networking services to all applications and deployment models. Container integration rapid-releases will enable global security and more to new app platforms (e.g. PKS). VMware is also adding new accelerated performance optimizations for distributed workloads, which will better support telco/network functions virtualization environments.

Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN): VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is the industry-leading SD-WAN solution that combines the economics and flexibility of the best real-time network overlay with the deployment speed, scale and automation of cloud-delivered services. With NSX SD-WAN, customers can deliver better cloud and application performance with full visibility, metrics, control, and automation of all device and user endpoints, with lower overall costs. NSX SD-WAN integrates with NSX Data Center and NSX Cloud, enabling customers to extend consistent networking and security policies from the data centre to the branch to the cloud, while providing operational visibility and control end-to-end. NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud provides an extensible platform for enterprises and telcos to integrate both on-premises and cloud services under the same consistent business policy framework. NSX SD-WAN is available to customers in three ways. Customers can purchase NSX SD-WAN as a service from VMware, or from more than 60 communication service providers worldwide. NSX SD-WAN is also available as an on-premises deployable solution. More than 2,000 customers have adopted NSX SD-WAN to date.

  • Multi-Cloud Networking: VMware NSX Cloud provides consistent networking and security for applications running in both private VMware-based data centres and natively in public clouds. NSX Cloud addresses operational challenges inherent with using multiple public clouds, such as inconsistent policies and constructs across clouds; manual operations requiring policy for each cloud, region, and VPC: limited operational visibility into East-West traffic; and operations tools that are specific to each public cloud.

With the latest release of NSX Cloud, VMware will add new native controls for customers that are using Microsoft Azure as part of their multi-cloud strategy.

  • Hybrid Cloud Connectivity: VMware NSX Hybrid Connect enables customers to solve one of the biggest challenges with hybrid cloud – consistent networking. VMware NSX Hybrid Connect enables customers to create a consistent, highly performant, and more secure software fabric that interconnects data centres and clouds while maintaining the same governance and control. With NSX Hybrid Connect, customers can seamlessly migrate workloads from any VMware environment to a modern software-defined data centre environment running anywhere — on-premises, in the public cloud, or operated by a VMware Cloud Provider partner.

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VMware Elevates The Hybrid Cloud Experience With New Releases of vSphere and vSAN

Posted in Commentary with tags on April 17, 2018 by itnerd

VMware today unveiled new releases of VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN — which power the industry’s leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions — to help enterprises securely run their business-critical and modern applications in the data centre, at the edge, in the public cloud, or in hybrid cloud environments. VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 will both enhance user experience, security, application support, and hybrid cloud management features.

Enterprises are faced with increasingly complex technology environments made up of a growing landscape of public cloud services as well as data centre and edge resources. To cope with this complexity and the growing rate of technological changes, enterprises need to build on a digital foundation that provides consistent infrastructure and operations and is secure by default. VMware’s software forms an integrated digital foundation that powers the apps and services transforming businesses and industries. For customers, this provides the broadest investment protection by enabling a flexible and secure common operating environment from the cloud to the data centre to the edge.

VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN — building blocks of this digital foundation — both have leading positions in their relative industries according to IDC. (1,2)

VMware vSphere 6.7: Efficient and Secure Platform for the Hybrid Cloud
VMware vSphere 6.7 will introduce new capabilities and enhancements to help deliver an efficient and more secure platform for hybrid cloud environments. The latest release will feature simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, increased support for more workloads, and further enable a seamless hybrid cloud experience. VMware vSphere 6.7 will continue to offer customers a universal application platform that supports workloads spanning artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Big Data, business-critical, cloud-native, in-memory, and 3D graphics, among others.

New and enhanced features in VMware vSphere 6.7 will include:

  • New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
  • New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot: Will significantly reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain further re-start efficiencies.
  • New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and new apps.
  • Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern Workloads: Will improve host lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI and ML.
  • New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0: This combination will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized components and enable guest OS security features.
  • Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager along with an increased support for third-party products.

The enhanced vCenter Server Appliance will deliver an improved user experience made possible through more efficient management capabilities and significant performance improvements. It will deliver a faster experience for vSphere admins (compared to vSphere 6.5), while delivering considerable time and cost savings. Performance improvements will include:

  • 200 per cent faster performance in vCenter operations per second (3)
  • 300 per cent reduction in memory usage (3)
  • 300 per cent faster DRS-related operations (e.g. Power-on, Placement of VM) (3)

VMware vSphere customers can deploy VMware AppDefense to further secure applications running in the data center or cloud. AppDefense leverages its unique position in vSphere to understand what applications are intended to do, monitor against that intended state, and automate response if anyone or anything attempts to manipulate them.

VMware vSAN 6.7: Elevates the HCI Experience On-Premises and in the Cloud
Powering the largest hybrid cloud ecosystem of any HCI vendor, vSAN enables customers to evolve their vSphere environment on-premises or in the cloud with hyper-converged infrastructure that lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) with efficient operations and that easily scales to future demands. VMware vSAN 6.7 reduces time-to-expertise with a new intuitive interface and accelerates decision-making through advanced monitoring and analytics.

New and enhanced features in VMware vSAN 6.7 include:

  • New VMware vSphere HTML5 Client Support: Will provide vSAN admins with a unified, intuitive management experience using the HTML5-based vSphere Client that introduces new functionality and optimized workflows for vSAN operations.
  • New Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server: Will offer a single pane of glass to monitor and control multiple HCI environments. vRealize Operations 6.7 will provide a global operations view of vSAN 6.7 environments with six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7 enabling customers to monitor capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts, and more. This capability does not require a separate vRealize Operations license and is available to anyone with a vSAN Advanced or vSAN Enterprise license.
  • New Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support: Will extend the suitability of HCI to applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered Windows Server environments. New application support requires customers to contact VMware for additional details.
  • New Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities: Will mitigate the effects of disruptive events such as hardware failures with smart resource allocation.
  • Enhanced vSAN Encryption: Will meet strict U.S. Federal government security requirements with FIPS 140-2 validation to protect data from disruptive events.

As part of today’s announcement, VMware is also introducing vSAN ReadyCare to improve the support experience for HCI environments. VMware will help customers maintain performance by avoiding or quickly resolving issues and minimize downtime through a combination of proactive telemetry capabilities from vSAN Support Insight advanced analytics, and a broad investment in VMware support staff.

VMware is widely recognized as the leading HCI software provider, and now delivers vSphere and vSAN-powered HCI in two of the top four public cloud providers, including AWS and IBM. Through an expansive partner ecosystem, VMware supports the broadest set of consumption options for its HCI software from turnkey HCI integrated systems such as Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC solutions to certified vSAN ReadyNode hardware reference architectures to as-a-service consumption models in public clouds.

VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 are both expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Additional Resources

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VMware Updates vRealize Cloud Management Platform

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

VMware today announced new releases across its integrated VMware vRealize® cloud management platform (CMP) that will make it easier for customers to implement, use, and manage hybrid cloud environments. Guided by customer feedback, the new updates to the vRealize platform will combine to simplify how customers innovate and enable IT governance through new ‘self-driving’ operations capabilities that optimize workload performance and capacity across their hybrid clouds as well as through new and enhanced IT automation and productivity capabilities.

The new product releases — vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Automation 7.4, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, vRealize Log Insight 4.6 and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 — will come together in the VMware vRealize Suite to enable customers to manage and provision compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments at scale. The new operations, automation and lifecycle management features and enhancements across the integrated platform are designed to provide customers with faster overall time to value, improved ease of use, and increased control of VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) stack.

Self-Driving Operations to Assure Performance and Optimize Capacity Based on Intent

VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce several new and enhanced performance and capacity optimization capabilities to help customers address operational challenges. This new release will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centres and cloud environments. VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will also feature enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to better predict, prevent, and remediate problems via integrations across VMware’s SDDC stack. New features will include:

  • New Capacity Analytics Engine: VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce a new capacity analytics engine to provide customers with real-time visibility into capacity usage and demand to predict and improve capacity utilization. The new capacity analytics engine will feature ARIMA techniques and layer on periodicity, trend, and spike detection, along with a simplified user experience to help manage capacity as well as plan and forecast more accurately and faster than before. The new capacity management capabilities, which include cost analytics, will enable customers to more efficiently identify savings via automated reclamation of idle resources as well as right-sizing of environments; run “what-if” scenarios to plan for future projects; and plan capacity based on demand across clouds including VMware vSphere-based private clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware Cloud on AWS and their associated costs. The new capacity analytics engine will set the stage for the introduction of machine learning capabilities over time.
  • New Performance Automation based on Business and Operational Intent: This new release is designed to provide customers with continuous performance optimization of vSphere-based private clouds today, and VMware Cloud on AWS in the future, to meet application performance needs based on business intent (e.g., workload balancing to reduce software license costs by enabling license enforcement and separation or to meet performance SLAs) or operational intent (e.g., leaving headroom for business critical apps or to densify clusters). The software uses predictive analytics and enhanced automated workload balancing to drive the continuous optimization. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 6.7 and vRealize Automation 7.4 will deliver enhanced initial workload placement capabilities based on intent to provide customers with a closed loop operations experience. Customers will be able to turn on self-driving operations to continuously and automatically optimize workloads.
  • New Wavefront by VMware Integration: vRealize Operations 6.7 will feature a new out-of-the-box integration with Wavefront by VMware to empower IT and application owners to triage and resolve issues faster. This integration will help to rapidly on-board Wavefront through the automatic discovery of applications and the installation and management of the required agents. Additionally, this will enable IT to provide app monitoring capabilities to their DevOps teams for apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis, along with traditional apps.
  • New User Interface: This new release will be even simpler to use featuring a persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard to help customers quickly perform operational tasks. It will also include updated workflows for enterprise-wide troubleshooting with metrics and logs.

vRealize Automation 7.4 Delivers Increased Productivity and Faster Time to Value
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 will introduce key innovations and improvements to help customers achieve consistent operations, greater productivity and faster time to value. This latest release will feature new modern consumption and service delivery capabilities, enhanced multi-tenancy and increased product integration including:

  • New and Enhanced Curated Blueprints and OVF Files: This release will dramatically speed up application blueprinting by offering 120-plus free, curated blueprints and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files out-of-the-box. VMware has teamed with Bitnami to add 20 new blueprints and 100-plus new OVFs of popular applications and databases such as GitLab, Hadoop, Jenkins and MongoDB to speed application development and deployment.
  • New Custom Form Designer: This will enable IT teams to easily build rich service request forms for vRealize Automation 7.4 catalog items and reduce blueprint sprawl.
  • Enhanced Multi-Tenancy Capabilities: The new release will introduce filter-based networking services visibility and filter-based infrastructure elements visibility per tenant as well as support the latest release of vRealize Orchestrator, which is now multi-tenant.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager Now Extends to IT Content Management
Last September, VMware introduced vRealize Suite 2017 which took a leap forward in simplifying daily administration and operations of the suite with new built-in, automated lifecycle management of Day 0 through Day 2 tasks. The lifecycle management capabilities help customers speed time to value by automating the deployment, configuration and upgrading of products in the suite. The new VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 will extend lifecycle management to integrated IT content management across infrastructure and cloud environments. New features include:

  • New In-Product Marketplace: This release will introduce a new and integrated “app store”-like experience for customers to consume out-of-the-box solutions from VMware and ecosystem partners. These solutions will span vRealize Operations management packs, vRealize Log Insight content packs, and vRealize Automation blueprints and plug-ins. Within the Lifecycle Manager, customers will be able to access, download, deploy and delete relevant packaged applications and content.
  • New IT Content Lifecycle Management: This release will also enable IT content lifecycle management including automated release pipeline for content capturing, testing and deployment; storing and versioning of content via integration with GitLab; and, support for multi-developer use cases. The content management capabilities will allow customers to treat infrastructure content as applications and apply DevOps principles to manage vRealize content with speed, quality and consistency across multiple environments.

Today’s news bookends the recent VMware Cloud Services updates including the introduction of VMware Log Intelligence and enhancements to Wavefront by VMware and VMware Cost Insight. VMware is innovating across its cloud management portfolio while providing customers with choice of how to consume its offerings – as a service via a subscription model or on-premises via a license model.

 

Product Availability
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4, VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6, VMware vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 are all expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Here’s some links with additional information from VMware:

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VMware Patches Spectre Vulnerability In VMware Fusion…. So, What About Parallels Desktop For Mac?

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 29, 2018 by itnerd

If you run virtual machines on your Mac, you have two choices. You can run VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. In both cases, you have to worry about the fallout from the Spectre and Meltdown CPU issues. And in the case of VMware Fusion, they’ve addressed Spectre in their latest update. Specifically, they’ve addressed an attack vector that only appears on virtual machines. Plus VMware has provided specific instructions on how their users can secure themselves.

So, that leaves Parallels Desktop For Mac. What are they doing to protect their users? Well, the closest thing to advice that I have seen is these Tweets:

And:

The problem with this response is that patching macOS and whatever operating systems that you’re using in your virtual machines isn’t enough as pointed out by VMware. Thus there has to be a patch for the virtual machine software. Now I tried to find any further communication from Parallels and I could not. Thus you have to wonder if Parallels is working on something, or are they ignoring this. I say that because in the absence of any info, people will wonder if the company actually cares. Thus if I were Parallels, I’d be putting out some sort of statement of Spectre and Meltdown ASAP, because VMware has beaten them to the punch and is drawing a pretty stark comparison between the two products that has VMware in control of the message on this issue.

UPDATE: Parallels released an update to Parallels Desktop For Mac. The release notes make no mention of Spectre and Meltdown fixes. So I pinged Parallels over Twitter. Here’s what I got back:

The release notes that is referenced in the Tweet is the same one that I looked at prior to pinging them on Twitter. Thus it doesn’t appear that they’ve done anything to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown despite the fact that their nemesis VMware Fusion has.

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