Knowledge Base

• After you install VMware Tools, VM Memory and VM Processor might not appear in the performance counters list in the Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon). Performing an upgrade or repair of VMware Tools does not resolve this problem. After you install this patch, you can upgrade or repair VMware Tools to resolve the issue.
  
  
• In this patch release, the PVSCSI driver is updated to version 1.0.7.0 for the following Windows guest operating systems: Windows XP (32/64-bit), Windows 2003 (32/64-bit), Windows Vista (32/64-bit), Windows 2008 RTM (32/64-bit), Windows 7 (32/64-bit), and Windows 2008 R2 (64-bit).
  
  
• Creation of quiesced snapshots might not work on non-English versions of Microsoft Windows guest operating systems
  The issue occurs when a Windows known folder path contains non-ASCII characters, for example, in the case of the application data folder in Czech Windows guest operating systems. This issue causes the snapshot operation to fail. This issue is resolved by applying this patch.
  
  
• If an administrator opens a console through the vCenter Client to a Windows virtual machine on which multiple users are logged in through terminal sessions, their mouse movements might become synchronized with the mouse movements of the administrator.
  
  
• Virtual machines display increased memory usage in vmware-guestd and vmwareservice.exe. The memory footprint of the process continues to increase until the available memory is drained and the process cannot allocate any memory. This issue is more prominent when the guest operating system has a large number of IP addresses associated with it.
  
  
• Windows guest operating systems installed with VMware Windows XP display driver model (XPDM) driver might fail with a vmx_fb.dll error and display a blue screen.
  
  
• Quiesced snapshots might fail on some non-English versions of Windows guest operating systems, such as French versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows 7 guest operating systems. This issue occurs because the VMware Snapshot Provider service does not get registered as a Windows service or as a COM+ application properly on some non-English versions of Microsoft Windows guest operating systems. This issue causes the whole snapshot operation to fail, and as a result, no snapshot is created.
  
  
• While installing VMware Tools on certain guest operating systems such as RHEL 3, you might see an error message similar to the following:
  Symbol __stack_chk_fail from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/vmware_drv.o is unresolved!
  
  
• When you upgrade VMware Tools with HGFS installed from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0, the HGFS driver might not be uninstalled properly. As a result, the Windows virtual machine's network Provider Order tab at Network Connections > Advanced > Advanced Settings displays incorrect information and the virtual machine might lose network connectivity. This issue is resolved by applying this patch. Now the older version of the HGFS driver and all related registry entries are uninstalled properly during upgrade.
  
  
• If hardware acceleration is set to None on a Windows virtual machine, even if you enable the Check and upgrade Tools before each power-on option, VMware Tools is not upgraded immediately after you restart the virtual machine. VMware Tools is upgraded only when you respond to the hardware acceleration dialog box that the virtual machine displays after you log in.
  
  
• The listProcessesInGuest vmrun command might fail to run on Ubuntu 10.04 guest operating systems. The guest operating system displays an an error message similar to the following:
  Error: Invalid user name or password for the guest OS
  
  
• The VMware Control Panel UI button in the Windows Control Panel for performing VMware Tools upgrade from a Windows guest operating system is disabled for non-administrator users. Also Shrink and Scripts options in the VMware Tools Control Panel are disabled for non-administrator users. This fix is only a UI change and does not block upgrades from custom applications. To block VMware Tools upgrades for all users, set the isolation.tools.autoinstall.disable="TRUE" parameter in the VMX file.
  
  
• After you install VMware Tools for Linux and restart the guest operating system, the device manager for the Linux kernel (udev) might report extraneous errors similar to the following:
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'SUBSYSTEMS'
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'ATTRS{vendor}'
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'ATTRS{model}'
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'SUBSYSTEMS'
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'ATTRS{vendor}'
  May 4 16:06:11 rmavm401 udevd[23137]: add_to_rules: unknown key 'AT
  This issue is resolved by applying this patch. Now the VMware Tools Installer for Linux detects the device and only writes system-specific rules.
  
  
• Windows virtual machine with low kernel memory causes VMware Tools to fail intermittently.
  
  
• When you install or update VMware Tools on Linux virtual machines, the VMware Tools installer might overwrite any entries in the configuration files (such as /etc/updated.conf file for RedHat and Ubuntu, and /etc/sysconfig/locate for SuSE) made by third party development tools. This might affect cron jobs running updatedb on these virtual machines. This issue is resolved by applying this patch.

Deployment Considerations

None beyond the required patch bundles and reboot information listed in the table above.

Patch Download and Installation

The typical way to apply patches to ESXi hosts is through the VMware Update Manager. For details, see the VMware vCenter Update Manager Administration Guide.

ESXi hosts can also be updated using vSphere Host Update Utility or by manually downloading the patch zip file from http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/download/ and installing the bulletin by using the vihostupdate command through the vSphere CLI. For details, see the vSphere CLI Installation and Reference Guide and the vSphere Upgrade Guide.