ESX Server 3.5, Patch ESX350-200806401-BG: Updates to VMkernel and hostd

Summaries and Symptoms

Issues fixed in this patch (and their relevant symptoms, if applicable) include:

• When a LUN that is mapped to an IBM Storage Volume Controller (SVC) is unpresented from storage on ESX Server, the path does not appear as down and failover does not occur. (PR 269630)
  
  
• Data Direction for vendor-specific SCSI command descriptor blocks (CDBs) was not passed down from the virtual machine to VMkernel for RDM and RAW devices. (PR 246538)
  
  Symptoms: Without this fix, certain vendor-specific applications and agents on virtual machines cannot send vendor-specific SCSI commands successfully to storage devices through QLogic HBAs.
  
  

• Fixed a concurrency issue in retrieving the AboutInfo data structure. (PR 271229)

  Symptoms: When querying the host’s AboutInfo data structure concurrently through the SDK, the host agent process could crash due to a memory corruption. The code returning the AboutInfo data has been fixed to handle concurrency correctly. For more information about this data structure, see Data Object: AboutInfo in the VI API Reference.

Deployment Considerations

None beyond the required patch bundles and reboot information listed in the table, above.

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX Server 3.5 hosts.

To update ESX Server 3.5 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the most recent patch bundle from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html and install the bundle using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.