How to find virtual machines with CPU MPX(Memory Protection Extensions) feature exposed

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Memory protection extensions (MPX) were introduced in Intel Skylake generation CPUs and provided hardware support for bound checking. This feature will not be supported in Intel CPUs beginning with the Ice Lake generation.

VMs that were powered on Skylake machines that were not in an EVC cluster will have that feature exposed.

This article will show how to find out those VMs with MPX feature exposed in case huge number of VMs in customer environment.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

Resolution

1. Login to ESXi via ssh

2. Execute below commands to list the VMs name with MPX feature exposed.
cd /vmfs/volumes
grep "cpuid.mpx" */*/vmware.log | grep "VM Features Required"

###Example output of above command
<Datastore Name>/<VM Name>/vmware.log:YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS In(05) vmx - VM Features Required: cpuid.mpx - Bool:Min:1