On Wed, Jan 3, 2018, at 7:53 PM, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 03:11:02PM +1000, Arjen Lentz wrote:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
A nuisance indeed, most hosted VMs will be impacted - with the % performance loss, companies may need to scale up or out additionally, incurring extra cost. This won't create happiness.
it won't be too big a deal if you have another VM host (AMD, or an Intel running the patched kernel) to live-migrate running instances to.
then reboot (or replace) the machine when it has no VMs left running on it...and start live-migrating some or all of the VMs back to it.
migration is still likely to breach any contract requiring five-9s or better uptime, unless the VMs are running off shared storage like iscsi or drbd (the bulk of the time required for a live-migration is saving the current state and copying the VM's disk images).
A good VM hosting service should, IMO, already by set up for this kind of HA live migration anyway.
Exactly. The only thing you may notice is the associated performance hit. You do need a new kernel too though, which does mean a reboot has to happen of the VM, but any system needing five-9s uptime has redundancy to handle that in a rolling fashion too.