Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

This patch contains the following fixes and enhancements:

• Fixes an issue that will circumvent the need to wait for VMFS operations to complete on certain conditions, thereby reducing occurrence of virtual machines lockup in ESX 4.0 hosts.

Symptom: Virtual machines might fail or temporary unresponsive network can occur during VMFS configuration changes. Other possible time-consuming VMFS locked-out operations include:

• Creating a VMFS datastore
• Expanding a VMFS datastore onto additional extents
• Powering on a virtual machine
• Acquiring a lock on a file
• Creating or deleting a file
• Creating a template
• Deploying a virtual machine from a template
• Creating a new virtual machine
• Migrating a virtual machine with vMotion
• Growing a file. For example, a snapshot file or a thin provisioned virtual disk.

• On ESX 4.0 hosts connected through vSphere Client and vCenter Server, the status of the System Board 2 ProcHot sensor is displayed as Unknown. In vSphere Client, the System Board 2 ProcHot sensor status is displayed under the Configuration tab. In vCenter Server, the System Board 2 ProcHot sensor status is displayed under the Hardware Status tab. This issue is seen only on ESX hosts running on HP AMD platforms that support the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

After applying this patch:

• On ESX hosts connected through vSphere Client, the System Board 2 ProcHot sensor is not listed.
• On ESX hosts connected through vCenter Server, the System Board 2 ProcHot sensor does not report status and displays Current State: Unknown: OEM-Specific in the Details column.

• Improves the performance of backup applications such as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) on ESX 4.0.

• Fixes an issue in Linux virtual machines where the network interface service shuts down before the VMware Tools service.

Deployment Considerations

Restart the vSphere Client.

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.