Hardware

What You Need to Know About Upgrading to an iPhone Xs or Xr

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I just got a new iPhone Xs Max. I had an iPhone 6s which I liked a lot, but it’s been a few years and with more travel I thought I’d enjoy having a better device with me. There are a few things that bit me in the duff. Some two-factor authentication (2FA) apps like Duo or Google Authenticator store their data in the iPhone Secure Enclave, which isn’t backed up to iCloud or via iTunes. That means that when you switch devices (or if you lose your device) you could lose access to your accounts, or it’ll be a serious pain to regain access (which is the point of 2FA). So don’t trade in your old phone until you’ve …

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vSphere 6.7 Will Not Run In My Lab: A Parable

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“Hey Bob, I tried installing vSphere 6.7 on my lab servers and it doesn’t work right. You tried using it yet? Been beating my head against a wall here.” “Yeah, I really like it. A lot. Like, resisting the urge to be irresponsible and upgrade everything. What are your lab servers?” I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Dell PowerEdge R610s.” I was actually surprised it was that new, and rack-mountable. “Yeah, you’re out of luck. CPUs before the E3/E5/E7 family didn’t have VT-x extensions in them to make virtualization easy so VMware had to do this thing called binary translation. vSphere 6.5 was the last release that they supported that on because, frankly, it’s slow …

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No VMware NSX Hardware Gateway Support for Cisco

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I find it interesting, as I’m taking my first real steps into the world of VMware NSX, that there is no Cisco equipment supported as a VMware NSX hardware gateway (VTEP). According to the HCL on March 13th, 2018 there is a complete lack of “Cisco” in the “Partner” category: I wonder how that works out for Cisco UCS customers. As I continue to remind vendors, virtualization environments cannot virtualize everything. There are still dependencies on things like DNS, DHCP, NTP, and AD that need a few physical servers. There will also always be a few hosts that can’t be virtualized because of vendor requirements, politics, and/or fear. Any solution for a virtual environment needs to help take care of those …

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How to Troubleshoot Unreliable or Malfunctioning Hardware

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My post on Intel X710 NICs being awful has triggered a lot of emotion and commentary from my readers. One of the common questions has been: so I have X710 NICs, what do I do? How do I troubleshoot hardware that isn’t working right? 1. Document how to reproduce the problem and its severity. Is it a management annoyance or does it cause outages & downtime? Is there a reasonable expectation that what you’re trying to do should work the way you expect? That might seem like an odd question, but sometimes other people do the procurement for (and without) us and there are gotchas they didn’t think to ask about. In my case with the X710s I felt I …

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Intel X710 NICs Are Crap

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(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) In the not so distant past we were growing a VMware cluster and ordered 17 new blade servers with X710 NICs. Bad idea. X710 NICs suck, as it turns out. Those NICs do all sorts of offloads, and the onboard processor intercepts things like CDP and LLDP packets so that the OS cannot see or participate. That’s a real problem for ESXi hosts where you want to listen for and broadcast meaningful neighbor advertisements. Under Linux you can echo a bunch of crap into the right spot in /dev and shut that off but no such luck on …

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Should We Panic About the KPTI/KAISER Intel CPU Design Flaw?

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As a followup to yesterday’s post, I’ve been asked: should we panic about the KPTI/KAISER/F*CKWIT Intel CPU design flaw? My answer was: it depends on a lot of unknowns. There are NDAs around a lot of the fixes so it’s hard to know the scope and effect. We also don’t know how much this will affect particular workloads. The folks over at Sophos have a nice writeup today about the actual problem (link below) but in short, the fix will reduce the effectiveness of the CPU’s speculative execution and on-die caches, forcing it to go out to main memory more. Main memory (what we call RAM) is 20x slower than the CPU’s L2 cache (look below for a good link showing …

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Intel CPU Design Flaw, Performance Degradation, Security Updates

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I was just taking a break and reading some tech news and I saw a wonderfully detailed post from El Reg (link below) about an Intel CPU design flaw and impending crisis-level security updates to fix it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fix for the problem is estimated to decrease performance by 5% to 30%, with older systems being the hardest hit. Welcome to 2018, folks. In short, an Intel CPU tries to keep itself busy by speculating about what it’s going to need to work on next. On Intel CPUs (but not AMD) this speculative execution doesn’t properly respect the security boundaries between the OS kernel and userspace applications, so you can trick an Intel processor into letting …

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Fix WinRM Client Issues

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My team manages a lot of Dell hardware. Over the years we’ve run into situations where we have to replace the system board on a host. The system board’s management interface, iDRAC, has a license key on it, and when you replace the system board it’s helpful if you can export the license key ahead of time. That way you can reimport it again easily without getting your sales team involved to reissue a key. Unfortunately sometimes that’s not possible, such as when the iDRAC management interface is what died (my case today). Turns out that Dell has the “Dell EMC License Manager” (get it from support.dell.com under the Systems Management downloads for your hardware) which you can proactively take …

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Intel’s Memory Drive Implementation for Optane Guarantees its Doom

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A few weeks ago Intel started releasing their Optane product, a commercialization of the 3D Xpoint (Crosspoint) technology they’ve been talking about for a few years. Predictably, there has been a lot of commentary in all directions. Did you know it’s game changing, or that it’s a solution looking for a problem? It’s storage. It isn’t storage. It’s RAM. It isn’t RAM. It’s too slow to be RAM. It’s too small for storage. It’s useful now. Nobody will use it for years. Yup. Confusion. It’s because Optane is a bunch of different things. It’s consumer and enterprise, and it’s both storage and memory. There are plenty of articles out there on the technology itself. There’s a small M.2 version for desktops …

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Dell PowerEdge 12G Is Here

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Over the last week there’s been a number of different posts about the new Dell PowerEdge models, the 12th generation (12G) of their server line. I was briefed both by Dell technical staff and by Dell executive staff on the Rx20 lineup and I took a few notes. I was mainly briefed about the Dell PowerEdge R620, R720, R720xd, which will be in the first wave of refreshes. The higher-end models, like the R820 and R920, and the cloud & HPC focused C-series, will be part of another release soon after, and reach into the higher-end E7 CPU models (8 way, 10 cores) from Intel. The new mid-range hosts are built around the Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, also known as …

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