Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

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

• Guest operating system's memory usage might be overestimated on Intel systems that support EPT technology or AMD systems that support RVI technology. This issue might cause the memory alarms in vCenter to go off spuriously even if the guest is not actively accessing a lot of memory.
• DVFilter APIs fail for particular message types during message reordering.
• DVfilter socket reads might fail if zero bytes are returned due to a connection close.
• ESX might fail if a guest operating system is moved from one vswitch port to another. This fix allows dropping frames which are accidentally or maliciously posted to a different portset.
• Incorrect SysAlert() messages might be displayed on certain systems if the number of cache colors is not calculated correctly.
• Monitor or VMkernel crashes when running certain guest operating systems with a 32-bit monitor running in binary translation mode.
• Connection to ESX hosts, virtual machines or storage is lost after installing vSphere.

Deployment Considerations

BEFORE INSTALLING THIS PATCH: If you have set Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 0 to workaround the high memory usage issue detailed in the Summaries and Symptoms section, undo the workaround by setting Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 1.

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware vCenter Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX 4.0 hosts.

To update ESX 4.0 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the patch zip file from http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/download/ and install the bulletin using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX 4 Patch Management Guide.