Synopsis
At the beginning of 2018 a major focus was put upon a vulnerability, called spectre, which was present in virtually all processors built for the last several years. The release of spectre has forced many older systems to be upgraded in order to attempt to bring them into compliance for various standards including Payment Card Industry (PCI). As many system administrators continue to push for updates in their environments it is a delicate balancing act between updates and system availability. In many environments major systems like vCloud Director cannot have much, if any, downtime or there is no administrator on-staff who is technically able to perform the upgrade. Regardless of the reasoning this can leave an administrator with a very old instance of vCloud running in the environment that is not able to support hypervisors, vCenters, or patches that are spectre compliant.
I recently moved into a role that had vCloud 5.5.6 installed along with vShield 5.5.4. After a quick conversation with VMware they confirmed that vCloud 5.5.6 and vShield 5.5.4 were not going to receive any updates for spectre compliance. Therefore best solution is to upgrade the existing installations to a newer version of vCloud and NSX. As an alternative, you can stand up a new instance of vCloud and NSX and migrate your configuration, however that is very time consuming and typically requires migrations of vCloud information. To make the process as simple as possible our department decided upon upgrading vCloud to 8.20 with NSX 6.2. Since this is an in-place upgrade, all information was retained within vCloud and all functionality we utilize continued to work after the upgrade. We also obtained many new features with the new vCloud such as enabling/disabling hot-plug, time sync, etc. from within the vCloud UI/API. This helps our department greatly as we utilize vCloud as a front end UI for several system administrators to self-manage their own environments.