Welcome to March!

VMware Security Advisories

• VMSA-2022-0027 – This existing advisory on NSX-V vulnerability has been updated to advise that there are active exploits in the wild.  If you are still running NSX-V and cannot migrate to NSX-T – please review – a patch has been made available.
• VMSA-2023-0004 -Carbon Black App Control addresses injection vulnerability
• VMSA-2023-0005 – vRealize Orchestrator update addresses XML External Entity vulnerability
• VMSA-2023-0003 – Workspace ONE Content Update addresses passcode bypass vulnerability

Upcoming Events

VMware Explore 2023
Las Vegas, Nevada
August 21-24 2023

That’s right – VMware Explore is heading back to Las Vegas!  Save the Date!

Product Support Watch

The following products are nearing the End of General Support.  You can find the full list on the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

vSphere – vCenter and ESXi

• General support for versions 6.5 and 6.7 has ended.  You can still upgrade to Version 7

Skyline– Free to upgrade – learn how.  If you are not using Skyline yet, check it out !  This tool is free, easy, and useful

• Skyline Collector 3.1 – 2/10/23
• Skyline Collector 3.2 – 8/25/23

NSX 

• NSX-V (all versions) – General Support ended January 16, 2022 – Customers should migrate to NSX-T
• NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1.x – 7/31/23
• NSX Advanced Load Balancer 21.1.x – 8/31/23

Disaster Recovery

• Site Recovery Manager 8.3, 8.4 – 4/1/23
• vSphere Replication 8.3, 8.4 – 4/1/23

Horizon View / Workspace ONE

• Horizon 7.13 – 4/30/23
• Dynamic Environment Manager 10/2103 – 3/23/23
• Dynamic Environment Manager 10/2106 – 7/15/23
• App Volumes 4 2013 – 3/23/23
• Identity Manager 3.3.6 – 7/18/23
• Workspace ONE UEM Console 2109 – 6/22/23
• Workspace ONE UEM Console 2111  – 7/13/23
• Workspace ONE Access 21.08  – 9/06/23
• ThinApp 5.x – 7/13/23

vRealize Suite

• Automation
  • 8.7 – 3/22/23
  • 8.8 – 4/28/23
  • 8.8.1 – 6/9/23
  •  8.8.2 – 7/12/23
  •  8.9 – 8/9/23
  •  8.9.1 – 9/6/23
• Orchestrator –
  • 8.7 – 3/22/23
  • 8.8 – 4/28/23
  • 8.8.1 – 6/9/23
  • 8.8.2 – 7/12/23
  •  8.9 – 8/9/23
  •  8.9.1 – 9/6/23
• Lifecycle Manager
  • 8.7 – 3/22/23
  • 8.8 – 4/28/23
• Identity Manager – 3.3.6 – 7/18/23

Notes from the Field

vSphere 8 Update 1 has been announced!  It will become Generally Available in the next few weeks.  A few items included in this release:

• vSphere Configuration Profiles leave tech preview and are generally available.  They now support Distributed Switches!
• Skyline Health Diagnostics has been integrated into vCenter.  In the past, Health Diagnostics was a stand-alone appliance you can download and install.  Integrating this into vCenter makes it much easier to use this tool to review log files on your own.
• Green Metrics – makes it easier to track power consumed by workloads
• Okta Federated Identity Management for vCenter
• Quick boot support for hosts with TPM 2.0 chips

vSAN 8 Update 1 has been announced!   It will become Generally Available in the next few weeks.  A few items included in this release:

• HCI Mesh functionality expands
• Updates to vSAN Express Storage Architecture

The Best Practices Guide for Virtualizing SQL Server has been updated for vSphere 8

Skyline Collector 3.3 has been released.  This update adds Skyline Support for Log Insight.  If you haven’t updated your collector in a while or want to learn how to add other VMware products to Skyline – this video can help.

If you are new to the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) world – The Beginner’s Guide to Securing your Systems with TPM might get you started.

Time to update your VMware Fusion installs – Microsoft announces official support for Windows on Mac computers with Apple Silicon.

If you operate NSX in your environment, take a few minutes to read up on how to Secure the NSX Management Plane against exploits.

Does your environment have zombie VMs?  No we aren’t talking about The Walking Dead.  A Zombie VM is made up of the VMDK files leftover when a  VM is removed from inventory but not deleted.  These can consume a lot of space, and since they aren’t registered in vCenter there is no way to be alerted.  This TAM Lab talks about how to detect these Zombies and go about cleaning them up safely.  Please follow the precautions outlined in the video!