Knowledge Base

Symptoms

Hosts using the BCM5709 NIC might experience a loss of connectivity between the host and the network either when the driver is loaded and unloaded during operation, or during the intial network negotiation stage after boot.

Devices using the bnx2 driver which are not connected to the network during the boot phase might not experience the problem.

Deployment Considerations

Patch bundles ESX350-200802403-BG and ESX350-200802409-BG must be installed prior to installing this patch. The esxupdate utility will check to ensure ESX350-200802403-BG and ESX350-200802409-BG are installed before proceeding with installation of this patch.

Patch Download and Installation

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

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 the the esxupdate tool from the command line of the host. For more information on using esxupdate to manage patches on ESX Server 3.5 hosts, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.