Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

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

• megaraid2 driver fix for UNISYS platforms. (PR 230542)
  
  Symptoms: The ESX Server host might stall at boot up when loading the VMkernel megaraid2 driver on a UNISYS system.
  
  
• Allow Windows virtual machines to boot when DataDigest is enabled in software iSCSI. (PR 202475)
  
  Symptoms: When DataDigest is enabled for the software iSCSI initiator, certain Windows virtual machines might not boot. This situation occurs because of badly-formed I/O requests sent by the Windows guest operating system. This fix detects such I/O requests and handles them to allow the virtual machine to boot.
  
  
• Remove the spurious SysAlert warning messages that appear when some systems implement a number less than 8 MTRRs. (PR 225552)
  
  Symptoms: Warning messages appear that include the following text:
  
  ALERT: MTRR: 461: Unsupported number of MTRRS 7
  
  
• Prevent DHCP from resetting the IP address and netmask when trying to acquire or renew a lease, even though the IP address has not changed. (PR 220682)
  
  Symptoms: When DHCP tries to acquire or renew a lease, vmknic might lose network connectivity.
  
  
• The previous default multipath policy for all HDS modular storage arrays such as AMS, SMS, WMS, 9500V was MRU. Because all of these arrays are either Active/Active or Pseudo Active/Active, the default path policy for these arrays has been changed to FIXED with this patch. (PR 220844)
  
  
• Prevent the guest operating system from stalling for a long time during snapshot delete operations on very large snapshot files. (PR 203595)
  
  Symptoms: The virtual machine appears to be frozen for a long time when a snapshot is deleted on a virtual machine with a very large snapshot delta disk. Pings to the virtual machine time out and the virtual machine console appears to be frozen.
  
  
• Prevent the ESX Server host from crashing during snapshot consolidation. (PR 248646)
  
  
• Prevent the ESX Server host from rebooting while powering on a vSMP virtual machine on a Unisys ES7000/one with eight or fewer logical CPUs. (PR 233416)
  
  
• Optimize the emulation of instructions that access I/O ports. (PR 238415)
  
  Symptoms: The virtual machine crashes with ASSERT vmcore/vmm/bt/btinout.c:963.
  
  
• Optimize the emulation of string instructions on 64-bit guest operating systems. (PR 236996)
  
  
• Prevent hostd from crashing due to incompatible entries in /etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml. (PR 230199)
  
  

  Symptoms: The command vmware-cmd -l results in the following error message:
  
  /usr/bin/vmware-cmd: Could not connect to server
  (VMControl error -3: Invalid arguments: Login failed.)

  The ESX Server host disconnects from VI Client.
  
  
• Allow spaces in a password while creating and editing local ESX Server users through the VI Client. (PR 193474)
  
  
• Set the executable bit for .vmx configuration files in newly-created virtual machines. (PR 215679)
  
  Symptoms: The virtual machine console session in VI Client becomes blank while hot migrating a virtual machine from ESX Server 3.5.0 to ESX Server 3.0.2. The following error message displays:
  
  You need execute access in order to connect with the VMware console.
  Access denied for config file: <path>/<file name>.vmx
  
  
• Fixed a vmware-vpxa crash caused by invalid UTF-8 in /var/log/messages and other log files. (PR 203413)
  
  Symptoms: An error message similar to the following is seen in the VirtualCenter Agent (vpxa) logs:
  
  [2008-01-24 11:55:08.218 'App' 5925808 error] [VpxVmomi]
  Unhandled Exception: at line number 7, not well-formed (invalid token).
  
  
• Fix typographic errors in the message strings of storage controller battery status, which is displayed in the VI Client. (PR 249489)
  
  
• Add support for the Broadcom HT-1100 SATA/IDE controller. (PR 253613)
  
  
• Prevent path thrashing during an Invista all paths down condition. During all paths down, ESX Server continues to send I/Os to the device. If I/O happens to be RESERVE/RELEASE, Invista returns success and ESX Server declares the path UP, even though it is still down. (PR 199152)
  
  Symptoms: Under certain error conditions, EMC Invista users might see path thrashing between ON and STANDBY states.

Deployment Considerations

Patch Download and Installation

For information on using VMware Update Manager to automatically update ESX Server 3i hosts, see the VMware Update Manager Administration Guide.

ESX Server 3i hosts can also be updated by downloading the most recent patch bundle from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_3i.html and installing the bundle using the Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI). For more information on using the RCLI and the vihostupdate command to update ESX Server 3i hosts, see the and the ESX Server 3i Embedded Setup Guide or the ESX Server 3i Installable Setup Guide.

Note: ESX Server 3i hosts do not reboot automatically when using the RCLI and the vihostupdate command. The hosts must be manually rebooted after any update has been installed. Please refer to the guides listed above for more information or for information on how to perform updates so that they can be rolled back after installation.