Knowledge Base

Symptoms

The following symptom might be seen in systems without this patch:

• A potential kernel panic might occur in the LSI MPT SAS driver "mptscsi_2xx". Due to a change in the MPT SAS BIOS firmware, this driver can potentially panic the system during driver shutdown. The problem can affect both the ESX vmkernel and the "vmnix" Console OS kernel versions of the driver.

Impact

This patch resolves the symptom discussed above and improves patch management activities on all ESX Server hosts. Command line usage of the tool has not changed, but custom scripts and third-party utilities could be affected by these changes.

Download Instructions

Download and verify the patch bundle as follows:

1. Download patch ESX-9287937 by clicking on the link above.
2. Log in to the ESX Server service console as root.
3. Create a local depot directory.

   # mkdir -p /var/updates

   Note: VMware recommends that you use the updates directory.

4. Change your working directory to /var/updates.

   # cd /var/updates

5. Download the tar file into the /var/updates directory.
6. Verify the integrity of the downloaded tar file:

   # md5sum ESX-9287937.tgz

   The md5 checksum output should match the following:

   5a7995dd8d3bbe42fc836f51b03ef095  ESX-9287937.tgz

7. Extract the compressed tar archive:

   # tar -xvzf ESX-9287937.tgz

8. Change to the newly created directory, /var/updates/ESX-9287937:

   # cd ESX-9287937

Installation Instructions

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.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the archive, and if you are in the directory you created above, install the update using the following command:

# esxupdate update

If you want to run esxupdate from a different directory, you must specify the bundle path in the command:

# esxupdate -r file://<directory>/ESX-9287937 update

For example, if the host is called depot:

# esxupdate -r file:///depot/var/updates/ESX-9287937 update

During the update process, logs appear on the terminal. You can specify the verbosity of esxupdate logs by using the -v option as shown below.

# esxupdate -v 10 file://<directory>/ESX-9287937 update

For more information on using esxupdate, refer to the Patch Management for ESX Server 3 tech note at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_esxupdate.pdf.