Cisco HyperFlex Systems

2021: Three vulnerabilities that allow access to the entire infrastructure management system

Positive Technologies experts Nikita Abramov and Mikhail Klyuchnikov discovered three vulnerabilities in Cisco HyperFlex HX, a hyperconvergent platform for organizing IT infrastructure from scratch. PT announced this on June 18, 2021

Vulnerabilities allow you to negatively affect the internal infrastructure of the enterprise, which can lead to violations in its work, "said Nikita Abramov. - Consequences of operation follow from purpose of hyper convergent systems which are in fact DPC from a box, in one module uniting storage systems servers, network functions and software. Vulnerabilities in such systems allow you to access the management system of the entire infrastructure and affect its health: delete important files, disrupt, business processes clean up systems backup with critical ones - data scenarios attacks are limited only by the fantasy of an attacker.

According to the expert, for the successful operation of vulnerabilities, it is enough for an attacker to access the device's web interface and send a specific request. No special rights or permissions or authentication are required. It is difficult to estimate the number of vulnerable devices, since equipment of this kind is most often located in the internal network of the organization. From a technical point of view, these are logical errors, they often arise due to the inattention of the developer, due to the insufficient testing of code at the development stage.

In total, three vulnerabilities were discovered during the study - CVE-2021-1497 (rating 9.8 on the CVSS 3.1 scale, found Nikita Abramov), CVE-2021-1498 (7.3, found Mikhail Klyuchnikov) and CVE-2021-1499 (5.3, found Abramov and Klyuchnikov). The first two vulnerabilities are more dangerous, since their operation allows you to execute arbitrary commands on the operating system of the device with maximum privileges (root user) and web server rights (Tomcat 8), respectively. A third vulnerability made it possible to download arbitrary files without authorization with limited write rights; it is less dangerous than the first two.

To resolve vulnerabilities, follow the guidelines in Cisco Official Notices (1, 2).

2019: IntelliSnap certified for use with HyperFlex

On January 21, 2019, Commvault announced that its IntelliSnap snapshot technology was successfully tested and certified for use with Cisco HyperFlex hyperconvergent systems. More details here.

2018: HyperFlex 3.0: Added support for containers and Microsoft Hyper-V, integrated multi-cloud services

At the beginning of the year, Cisco introduced updated software for the Cisco HyperFlex platform. Version HyperFlex 3.0 simplifies and improves application performance in different cloud sizes. The new version adds features such as support for Microsoft Hyper-V, stretched clusters, containers and new multi-cloud services that allow you to deploy, manage, and monitor applications in any cloud. As a result, the updated system has a unique ability to support the development and deployment of both traditional and specialized cloud applications on a common hyperconvergent platform

Software version HyperFlex 3.

• Improved for critical and cloud tasks.
• Advanced hypervisor support. In addition to VMware, ESXi is supported by Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Container support. One of the innovations of the data platform was the FlexVolume driver, which made it possible to implement long-term storage for Kubernetes managed containers, as well as the development and deployment of both traditional and specialized cloud applications on the HyperFlex platform.
• Validation of enterprise applications. The HyperFlex platform is ready to launch a wide range of tasks, with various tools for profiling and determining the optimal configuration to support application migration projects. In addition to the Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) design and installation guides, Cisco provides guidelines for developing critical database, analytics, and ERP applications, including Oracle, SQL, SAP, Microsoft Exchange, and SpLk.

Organizations need to ensure task mobility and application monitoring in both public and private clouds. This task is performed by the HyperFlex platform, in which new services are integrated with the Cisco multi-cloud software portfolio.

• Monitoring application performance. AppDynamics combined with HyperFlex allows performance monitoring of hybrid applications running on the HyperFlex platform and in various clouds.
• Application placement. Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM) for HyperFlex helps customers automate the analysis and placement of work tasks.
• Cloud management. Introduced last year, the CloudCenter application for HyperFlex allows you to manage the lifecycle of work tasks in one cloud, as well as in several private and public clouds.
• Private cloud. CloudCenter for HyperFlex simplifies the deployment and management of virtual machines, containers, and applications, making it easier for developers and administrators to work with private clouds.

Cisco technologies enable customers to provide full fault tolerance with global cloud management coverage.

• Increasing local fault tolerance and scalability. Customers with a high density of virtual machines can now use the system: clusters HyperFlex scale to 64 nodes, while fault tolerance capabilities are expanded by supporting availability zones.
• Stretched clusters for data centers. To meet data protection and high availability requirements, the HyperFlex provides the ability to configure stretched clusters to ensure that campus and city networks are available in critical situations.
• Cloud management for data centers. Cisco Intersight now supports HyperFlex Cloud Deployment, making it easier to deploy and manage to remote sites.

2017: Cisco HyperFlex Upgrades

On March 16, 2017, Cisco introduced the upgraded functionality of the HyperFlex Systems portfolio.

By providing I/O stability and performance, Cisco combined the Cisco HX Data Platform (a distributed file system specifically designed for HCI clusters) with a factory [[ Cisco UCS Unified Computing System 'UCS]], which has low latency.

Cisco HyperFlex Systems View - Complete Hyperconvergence, (2016)

Version HyperFlex offers powerful sourcing options, advanced intuitive management, and enterprise data protection and information security features. High-capacity, 40-gigabit UCS-enabled all-flash nodes extend the ability of customers to maximize application performance.

Platform management using HyperFlex Connect supports dynamic system analytics and a standalone HTML5 interface for managing and orchestrating HyperFlex clusters from any device. Data management, protection and information security functionality for sensitive tasks, native replication functionality for application protection, fixed data protection options using self-encrypted disks.

2016

Integration of Commvault and Cisco HyperFlex

On July 13, 2016, Commvault's press service announced a joint solution with Cisco for simplified backup, recovery, and archiving of enterprise data.

Commvault integration in Cisco HyperFlex protects workloads and applications in physical, virtualized, and cloud infrastructures. With an upgraded architecture on the Cisco HyperFlex platform, organizations can provide a versatile backup, recovery, and archiving solution that lowers operating costs and enables flexible infrastructure scaling from terabytes to petabytes.

Commvault supports more than 20 cloud storage platforms and hardware environments and helps minimize dependency on specific hardware and cloud vendors.

Commvault for the sixth year in a row becomes the leader in backup and recovery for data centers according to Gartner. And therefore, we know well the problems that the market faces. We are honored to work with Cisco on these issues. The new joint solution will simplify the deployment of the data protection architecture, reduce the cost of acquiring unnecessary hardware and significantly reduce the time to implement solutions of the right scale.

HyperFlex Systems

HyperFlex Systems - solutions for implementing a modernized architectural approach to hyperconvergent infrastructure.

On March 3, 2016, Cisco introduced Cisco HyperFlex Systems, based on the Cisco UCS computing platform, it implements changes in the architectural approach to hyperconvergent infrastructure.

HyperFlex Systems (2016)

HyperfFlex Capabilities:

• Simple initial plug-n-play configuration with flexible, adaptive, and independent scaling of compute, network, and storage capacity
• Powerful data management services, including fast cloning and non-intrusive snapshot creation with continuous inline deduplication and inline compression, reduce storage by 80%
• The solution, which was originally designed to reduce total cost of ownership by 30% and improve performance by 40% over competitors' offerings, leverages hyperconvergence across a wide range of corporate tasks.