TechVirtuoso

VMWare has released eight patches for ESX 3.5, four of the eight patches are rated as critical from VMWare. There are no updates for VMWare ESXi. The updates can be downloaded from the VMWare ESX 3.5 Support website and installed manually by the using esxupdate from the command line of the host, or they can be automatically applied through VMWare Update Manager. For most of these patches, all virtual machine guests must be migrated to another host or shutdown before the patch is applied. The host server will then require a reboot.

Due to the critical nature of many of these patches, VMWare recommends quick evaluation and application of these patches.

ESX350-200908401-BG, Updates forcedeth driver
The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity until the forcedeth driver is reloaded. This patch addresses the issue.

The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

ESX350-200908402-BG, Updates VMware Tools
After performing VMotion between ESX 3.0.x and ESX 3.5 hosts, virtual machines running on ESX 3.5 hosts are restarted in order to upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools. After applying this fix, VMware Tools function as expected.

ESX350-200908403-BG, Updates megaraid and mptscsi drivers
This patch fixes the following issues:

• When the ESX host boots, the megaraid_sas driver heap gets depleted when claiming 4 LSI SAS RAID controllers on IBM System x3950 M2 Athena servers. This issue might cause the ESX host to stop booting. The fix increases the heap size for the megaraid_sas driver from 8 MB to 16 MB.
• The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908404-BG, Updates vmkctl
When N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) enabled virtual machines are powered on on ESX hosts, a rescan issued from the VI Client results in an error message stating that the rescan failed, even if the rescan is successful.

ESX350-200908405-BG, Updates vmkernel
Running the esxtop command on the service console of the ESX hosts lists high values for the max limited (%MLMTD) parameter for virtual machines when no max limited parameter is set. When the high values are listed, the performance of the virtual machines might be affected. In the VI Client, the max limited parameter is set in the Resources tab for CPU in Virtual Machine properties.

ESX350-200908406-BG, Updates vmx
This patch provides the following:

• Adds support for new SCSI-3 status values in the SCSI emulation for virtual machines.
• Fixes an issue where powering on customized versions of Ubuntu virtual machines from the ESX hosts might cause the ESX hosts to stop responding.

ESX350-200908407-BG, Updates kernel source and vmnix
This patch updates the service console kernel for the following fixes:

The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity under certain circumstances. The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

A bnx2x firmware dump issue.

The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908408-BG, Updates bnx2x driver
This patch fixes a bnx2x firmware dump issue.

Source: Boche