VMware ESXi 6.5, Patch Release ESXi-6.5.0-20171004001-standard

Products

VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Profile Name	ESXi-6.5.0-20171004001-standard
Build	For build information, see KB 2151081.
Vendor	VMware, Inc.
Release Date	October 5, 2017
Acceptance Level	PartnerSupported
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
Affected VIBs	VMware_bootbank_esx-base_6.5.0-1.29.6765664 VMware_bootbank_esx-tboot_6.5.0-1.29.6765664 VMware_bootbank_vsan_6.5.0-1.29.6765666 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_6.5.0-1.29.6765667
PRs Fixed	1869931, 1886760, 1893508, 1966720
Related CVE numbers	N/A

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Resolution

Summaries and Symptoms

This patch updates the following issues:

For vSAN All-Flash configurations with deduplication enabled you might see the following two vSphere Observations (VOBs) in the Events tab: "vSAN detected an unrecoverable medium or checksum error for component uuid on disk group uuid." and "vSAN detected and fixed a medium or checksum error for component uuid on disk group uuid."

In addition, you might encounter IO read errors and in some cases severe symptoms such as inaccessible VMs, host failures, or stuck resyncs. The issue manifests itself only under highly specific operations and IO patterns.

If you have seen the above messages, please call VMware Global Support Services immediately.

Notwithstanding, all vSAN customers using All-Flash with deduplication enabled must upgrade to this patch release immediately.

Due to a race condition between a parent and a child, during a fork() system call, a file opened by a child in Exclusive mode might fail with an error Device or resource busy.

In a VMware vSAN or VMware Horizon View environment, hostd on VMware ESXi 6.5 might intermittently become unresponsive.

An ESXi host might fail with a purple diagnostic screen due to a page fault exception in the CPU scheduler with a log similar to this:
2017-06-04T02:02:19.812Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bc60:[0x41802e2c161d]CpuSched_PcpuChoose@vmkernel#nover+0xc5 stack: 0x0 2017-06-04T02:02:19.812Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bcb0:[0x41802e2d5939]CpuSchedRebalance_PcpuMigrateIdle@vmkernel#nover+0x17d stack: 0x70aec092a0ca9 2017-06-04T02:02:19.813Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bd80:[0x41802e2c6f51]CpuSchedDispatch@vmkernel#nover+0x1331 stack: 0x410000000001.
This issue is most often seen in HPE Superdome systems with Intel v3 or Intel v4 processors.

Patch Download and Installation

The typical way to apply patches to ESXi hosts is through the VMware vSphere Update Manager. For details, see the Installing and Administering VMware vSphere Update Manager.

ESXi hosts can be updated by manually downloading the patch ZIP file from the VMware download page and installing the VIB by using the esxcli software vib command. Additionally, the system can be updated using the image profile and the esxcli software profile command. For details, see the vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples and the vSphere Upgrade Guide.