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ninyop
Contributor
Contributor

What TPM chips are supported by ESX4i

I read that ESX4i supports TPM so I was wondering what TPM chips are supported. I heard from one of our customers that only ATMEL chips are supported, is this true?

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Rayaa3
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If there is anyone currently using TPM and has more docs on it, I'd love to see some links on this as well. I find many sources (mostly 'what's new' style marketing) siting support for TPM in ESX4, ESXi4. However, I find no technical information about implementation or use on any of the pdf documents for esx or esxi. This is very non-typical for vmware, and documentation is a strength for most of their product features.

I did find one KB that essentially said "if you are getting errors about it, and it's not turned on, ignore it" however, no information about turning it on or off in ESX (only that it can be turned on/off in host bios).

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I'd proceed with caution, judging by the regularity of which TPM enabled laptops refuse to boot, incorrectly thinking that they've been tampered with.

Please award points to any useful answer.

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Rayaa3
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

that's a great example of why we need more documentation..

We need to know:

1) how to turn it on in the host, is it on automatically if the host is installed with TPM enable in the bios?

2) how to troubleshoot/monitor it, what to look for when things aren't working correctly.

3) More specific conceptual information about how the implementation of TPM works with esx, I don't think we are looking at bitlocker on esx here, but clearly the design of the system is such that fraudulent modules are not loaded at boot.

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