Along with the recent release of VMware vSphere 6.7 U2, we published a new whitepaper that shows the performance of a new scheduler option that was included in the 6.7 U2 update. We referred to this new scheduler option internally as the “sibling” scheduler, but the official name is the side-channel aware scheduler version 2, or SCAv2. The whitepaper includes full details about SCAv1 and SCAv2, the L1TF security vulnerability that made them necessary, and the performance implications with several different workload types. This blog is a brief overview of the key points, but we recommend that you check out the full document.
In August of 2018, a security vulnerability known as L1TF, affecting systems using Intel processors, was revealed, and patches and remediations were also made available. Intel provided micro-code updates for its processors, operating system patches were made available, and VMware provided an update for vSphere. The full details of the vCenter and ESXi patches are in a VMware security advisory that links to individual KB articles.