Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

This patch fixes the following issues:

• The esxupdate utility should exit if the bundle specified cannot be installed because of missing dependencies.
  
  Symptoms: Previously, if you used the command esxupdate –d <depot> -b <bundle> to install a bundle with one or more dependencies missing from the depot, the esxupdate utility did not install the specified bundle (as expected). However, if some dependencies existed in the depot and could be installed, esxupdate installed these dependencies, even though the specified bundle could not be installed. This unexpected behavior no long occurs with this release. Now, when you specify a bundle with the -b option and the specified bundle has one or more dependencies missing from the depot, esxupdate exits with an error message. The message notes the missing top-level dependency.
  
  
• The esxupdate query command does not display obsolete bundles.
  
  Symptoms: In prior releases of ESX, the esxupdate query command does not list the obsolete bundles. To resolve this issue, the esxupdate utility adds two new options:
  -a or --listall: This option displays all installed bundles, including obsolete bundles.
  -o or --onlyobsolete: This option displays only obsolete installed bundles.
  
  
• Add experimental support for a new utility, the VMDK Recovery Tool.
  
  You can use this tool to recover .vmdk files that have been corrupted or deleted. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007243.
  
  
• The esxupdate utility fails to resolve multi-level dependencies during patch installation.
  
  Symptoms: ESX 3.5 Update 2 introduced the use of a baseline for patch bundle installation. However, the baseline handles only one level of bundle requirements.
  
  Example: The following bundles exist in the depot, but they are not installed. Bundle A requires B, which requires C. Here, the command esxupdate -b <A> fails because C is not in the baseline.
  

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://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/download/ and install the bundle using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.