ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003374: Fixes for VMware Tools Installer

Symptoms

• Installation of VMware Tools on RHEL 5.1 server might fail with a message similar to the following:
  
  None of the pre-built modules vmmemctl modules for VMware tools is suitabale for your running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmemctl modules for your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)?
  
  
• Taking a quiesced snapshot of virtual machine running on Windows XP Professional x64 guest operating system might fail with an error message similar to the following:
  
  'VmMisc' 115039152 error] Failed to find conversion from winXPProX64 to type: vim.vm.GuestOsDescriptor.GuestOsIdentifier

Deployment Considerations

Download and verify the patch bundle as follows:

1.      Download patch ESX-1003374 from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html.

2.      Log in to the ESX Server service console as root.

3.      Create a local depot directory.

# mkdir -p /var/updates

Note: VMware recommends that you use the updates directory.

4.      Change your working directory to /var/updates.

# cd /var/updates

5.      Download the tar file into the /var/updates directory.

6.      Verify the integrity of the downloaded tar file:

7.      Extract the compressed tar archive:

# tar -xvzf ESX-1003374.tgz

8.      Change to the newly created directory, /var/updates/ESX-1003374:

# cd ESX-1003374

Installation Instructions

After you download and extract the archive, and if you are in the directory that you previously created, use the following command to install the update:

# esxupdate update

To run esxupdate from a different directory, you must specify the bundle path in the command:

# esxupdate -r file://<directory>/ESX-1003374 update

For example, if the host is called depot:

# esxupdate -r file:///depot/var/updates/ESX-1003374 update

During the update process, logs appear on the terminal. You can specify the verbosity of esxupdate logs by using the -v option as shown below.

# esxupdate -v 10 file://<directory>/ESX-1003374 update

For more information how to use esxupdate, see the Patch Management for ESX Server 3 tech note at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_esxupdate.pdf .