Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

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

• When you power on virtual machines on ESX 3.5 hosts, many inactive VMFS volumes are opened in addition to the VMFS volume containing the virtual machine disk files. This might cause the virtual machines to take more time to boot. In a cluster environment, this issue might also cause VMotion operations to timeout on the destination host. This fix ensures that only the VMFS volumes on which the virtual machines reside are opened.

• While performing a host rescan on ESXi, the host and virtual machines might stop responding till the end of the rescan operation. During this time, connections to virtual machines are lost, including SSH, client connections, and communication to other clustered storage modules. The virtual machines start responding after the rescan operation is completed.

• Excessive cold migration of virtual machines between ESX hosts might cause ESX hosts to be disconnected from vCenter Server due to a memory leak on the host agent (hostd).

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.

Note: All virtual machines on the host must be either shut down or migrated using VMotion before applying the patch. A reboot of the ESX Server host is required after applying this patch.

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.