Release date: September 15, 2016

• Intermittent memory leak in the hostd service might cause the following issues:
  
  1. The hostd service might fail.
  2. The hostd core dump is generated under /var/core/
  An error message similar to the following is displayed in the /var/log/hostd.log file:
  Invalid transition requested (VM_STATE_RECONFIGURING -> VM_STATE_GUEST_OPERATION): Invalid state
  
• The VMware vSphere Client might display incorrect health status for a system Fan. The health status displayed is normal instead of fail.
  
• The hostd service might stop responding and a core dump is generated under /var/core. Error messages similar to the following might be displayed in the hostd.log file:
  Memory exceeds hard limit. Panic;
  Lookupvm: Hostctl error retrieving VmkVm Obj for VM
  
• An issue in the glibc library might cause the hostd service to fail.
  
• Windows 2016 Hyper-V VMs might stop responding when booted up on an AMD Opteron system.
  
• The ESXi hosts might be unable to detect the drives that return descriptor format sense data. This happens because ESXi 6.0 and below do not support the descriptor format sense data.
  This patch resolves the issue by converting the descriptor format to fixed format sense.
  Note: The conversion done here is minimal, only SENSE KEY/ASC/ASCQ information is converted from descriptor format to fixed and any other details in the sense buffer is lost. This patch resolves the issue by converting the descriptor format to fixed format sense.
  
• When you boot a virtual machine for Citrix VDI, the physical switch is flooded with RARP packets (over 1000) which might cause network connections to drop and a momentary outage. This happens when you upgrade the ESXi host from ESXi 5.5 U2 to 5.5.x patch.
  
• During the VM heartbeat lost and recovered event of a VM, the SNMP traps are sent with different vmwVmIDs for the VM Heartbeat lost event.
  The vmwVmID mismatch might not clear the VM heartbeat alerts in some third-party monitoring tools.
  
• Attempts to perform Storage vMotion or cloning a VM or a VMDK in an environment which supports hardware acceleration (XCOPY) might fail. The issue occurs due to incorrect timeout value for SCSI commands after failing over from XCOPY.
  
• During an upgrade to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b an ESXi host may fail with purple diagnostic screen. An error message similar to the following is displayed:
  Could not load multiboot modules: Already exists.
  
• The ESXi 5.5 virtual machines might fail to power on during an HA fail over because it failed to lock virtual machine files.
  
• Attempts to adjust the vSAN components that are not part of the over commit list might fail with purple diagnostic screen. An error message similar to following is displayed:
  
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.387Z cpu5:33699)@BlueScreen: #PF Exception 14 in world 33699:tq:vsanutil IP 0x41801e6e4ba0 addr 0x8
  PTEs:0x28ae258023;0x12cc13023;0x12cc14023;0x0;
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.387Z cpu5:33699)Code start: 0x41801d800000 VMK uptime: 126:09:34:16.599
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.388Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd5f0:[0x41801e6e4ba0][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0xa0 stack: 0x4136
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.388Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd630:[0x41801e6e4ce6][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0xa6 stack: 0x412f207e6b00
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.388Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd730:[0x41801e6e33a7][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x5f3 stack: 0x0
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.389Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd8a0:[0x41801e6e3f08][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x6c0 stack: 0x4123ce8dd910
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.389Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd910:[0x41801e694865][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x305 stack: 0x412ed9d34d
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.389Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8dd9d0:[0x41801e695e93][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x6a3 stack: 0x4123ce8dda88
  2016-05-18T21:21:09.390Z cpu5:33699)0x4123ce8ddae0:[0x41801e4b530e][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x42a stack: 0x4
  
  
• An ESXi 5.5 host might fail with a purple diagnostic screen when new VM is deployed or VM is powered on.
  
• The ESXi firewall configuration might be disabled after scripted upgrade of ESXi 5.5 Update 1 or later using kickstart file over NFS/FTP.
  
  
• When using a NEC ESMPRO Server Manager as the Common Information Model (CIM) client software, you cannot connect to the WS-Management (openwsmand) service on the ESXi host. You see error messages similar to the following in the CIM client software:
  
  javax.xml.soap.SOAPException: java.io.IOException: Unauthorized
  
• Attempts to open multiple virtual machines with VMRC connections might fail. An error message similar to the following might be displayed:
  
  Unable to connect to the MKS: Connection terminated by server.
  
  When vsandevicemonitord runs using the Init process memory resource pool rather than its own memory space it might affect the available memory for other processes running in the Init memory resource pool.
  
• Attempts to disable ATS commands might fail and might appear on esxtop VAAI Stats. This happens when you disable VAAI ATS by setting Hardware Accelerated Locking to 0.
  
• Attempts to run esxcli commands might fail with an error message similar to the following in the hostd.log file:
  Error on command storage filesystem list. Error was Invalid name specified for MetaStructure: 'FilesystemVolume'
  
• The ESXi host might fail with a purple diagnostic screen. This happens when a magnetic disk is removed and subsequently added back to the disk group while the SSD of the DG is marked as PDL(Permanent Device Loss).
  
• After upgrading to ESXi 5.5 Patch 8, you might see following issues:
  
  1. Resuming a virtual machine with hardware version 8 or lower might fail on ESXi 5.5 Patch 8 (build 4179633). This happens if the virtual machine is suspended on a host prior to ESXi 5.5 Patch 8 upgrade (build 4179633)
  2. Migration of a virtual machine with hardware version 8 fails to host with ESXi 5.5 Patch 8 upgrade (build 4179633) under certain EVC configuration for hosts with Intel CPU.
     An error message similar to the following is displayed:
     The source detected that the destination failed to resume
  
  
• Attempts to reset Intel XHCI Host Controller driver might fail, due to which the system might stop responding.