Yours truly was selected as VMware vExpert in 2011 and it [...]]]> VMware vExpert title nominations for year 2012 are now open! VMware vExpert title is VMware’s way to say thank you to individuals who have contributed something significant to VMware Community in past year, may it have been active blogging, public speaking, tools/scripts etc.

Yours truly was selected as VMware vExpert in 2011 and it has been great honor, and even greater honor was to be selected as first vExpert in Finland ever!

This year there are some changes in vExpert program, VMware has introduced more paths to vExpert title.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist path.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

With the program growing, our goal still remains the same: to honour individuals who go above and beyond their everyday job requirements to share their technical knowledge and expertise with others; to help enable these individuals to make an even greater impact in the world; and to keep a high standard of vExpert recipients.

See more about vExpert 2012 program and nomination form at http://communities.vmware.com/vexpert.jspa

Cisco explains details of issue [...]]]> Cisco has today issued a security advisory for Denial of Service vulnerability in NX-OS. With specially crafted IP packet it may be possible to trigger a Cisco Nexus 1000v, 5000 or 7000 switch to reboot. Nexus 2000, 3000, 4000 and UCS Fabric Interconnects are not affected by this bug.

Cisco explains details of issue as follows

Certain versions of Cisco NX-OS Software for Cisco Nexus 1000v, 5000, and 7000 Series Switches are affected by a vulnerability that may cause a reload of an affected device when the operating system’s IP stack processes a malformed IP packet and obtaining Layer 4 (UDP or TCP) information from the packet is required.

The vulnerability is in the operating system’s IP stack and any feature that makes use of services offered by the IP stack to parse IP packets is affected. For instance, the following scenarios may trigger the vulnerability because they imply that Layer 4 (UDP or TCP) information is required to be able to perform the configured function:

• A malformed, transit IP packet that would normally be forwarded by the switch is received and the Time-to-live (TTL) is 1. In this case, an ICMP error message (time exceeded) needs to be generated. During generation of this ICMP message, the bug could be triggered.
• Policy-based routing is in use, and to make a routing decision, an incoming packet needs to be parsed. If the packet is a malformed TCP segment and the routing policy uses TCP information for routing decisions, then this bug could be triggered.
• An egress Access Control List (ACL) is applied to an interface and a malformed IP packet that needs to be forwarded through that interface is received.

Note: This list is not exhaustive. It contains some of the scenarios that have been confirmed to trigger the vulnerability described in this document. Other scenarios that require accessing Layer 4 information of a malformed IP packet may also result in the vulnerability being triggered.

If you are doing any L3 routing with your Nexus switch, or you have ACL applied to any interface, then this vulnerability could be exploited from external networks like Internet. Immediate upgrade of NX-OS is recommended.

Below is a list of vulnerable and fixed software versions

Vulnerable NX-OS releases, source Cisco.com

Full Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20120215-nxos is available at http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20120215-nxos

VMware paravirtual adapters are not available through VMware Workstation GUI, but you can enable them by tweaking Virtual Machine’s [...]]]> Did you know that you can use VMware paravirtual VMXNET3 and PVSCSI adapters with VMs running on VMware Workstation? Paravirtual adapters will improve networking and disk IO performance by using valuable CPU cycles more efficiently.

VMware paravirtual adapters are not available through VMware Workstation GUI, but you can enable them by tweaking Virtual Machine’s VMX configuration file with notepad. I have tested this with VMware Workstation 8, this may work also with Workstation 7.0 but I cannot guarantee it.

- Create a new VM or use existing VM, upgrade VMware Tools to latest available. If you wish to use PVSCSI adapter you must install PVSCSI driver in VMware Tools installer, it is not included in default install.

- Browse to VM configuration folder and open it’s .vmx configuration file in notepad

VMXNET3 network adapter

To change network device to VMXNET3 search for ethernet configuration option

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

change device type to vmxnet3

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"

And you may save .vmx file, VMXNET3 adapter is now available for use.

Paravirtual SCSI adapter

Changing SCSI adapter type is a bit trickier, process depends on the OS of your VM and which drivers it has available as standard. With Windows you need to add PVSCSI adapter as second SCSI adapter before you can remove LSI one, to do this you need to add new hard disk to your VM if you currently have only one as your system and data disk.

Windows version on VMware Tools default installation does not include PVSCSI driver, you must do custom install and configure PVSCSI driver to be installed. If you are unsure that you have PVSCSI driver installed re-run VMware Tools installer and select “modify” to verify.

Once you have necessary drivers installed and new hard disk for your VM open .vmx configuration file in notepad and search for new disk configuration parameters

scsi0:1.fileName = "TestVM-0.vmdk"

Edit second hard disk configuration to change its SCSI ID to 1:0 and add configuration for new PVSCSI controller

scsi1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1.virtualDev = "pvscsi"
scsi1:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi1:0.fileName = "TestVM-0.vmdk"

With these settings you can now boot up your Windows VM, once necessary drivers have been installed you may replace system disk LSI Logic adapter with pvscsi by editing .vmx configuration file.

scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"

lsilogic may also be lsisas1068, depending on the Windows version in your VM.

And there you have it, VMware paravirtual adapters VMXNET3 and PVSCSI in VMware Workstation VM.