A new patch has been made available for ESX 4.0 Update 1, this is called Update 1A. It only affects ESX and not ESXi. Here is an except of the alert put out by VMware:

ESX 4.0, Update 1, Alert: Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 can fail or time out and leave the host in an unusable state if using HP Systems Insight Management Agent. ESX 4.0 Update 1a (a re-release of ESX 4.0 Update1) that addresses this issue is available. Please read KB article (ID 1016070) before proceeding with the upgrade.

As I said above, this patch is listed as ESX 4.0 Update 1A and can be found on the VMware Downloads website, or from within VMware Update Manager.

Posted under vSphere

VMware recently released a patch, ESX350-200904401-BG which resolves a number of issues, which can be found in KB1010126.

The biggest fix that has affected me lately is, “Fixes an issue where an unsuccessful online consolidation might cause a virtual machine to fail and become unusable because of a CID mismatch.”

I recently ran into some problems with some virtual machines that have high I/O failing during the commit of a snapshot, I discussed this in an earlier post which can be found here.

I’d highly recommend anyone running ESX 3.5 to apply this update as it resolves a lot of known issues that can affect VM performance and stability.  Always remember to follow proper patching procedures, thoroughly test the patch install and verify before placing production Virtual Machines back on the host.

Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips

VMware has released the latest update to its ESX(i) 3.5 flagship product, Update 4.  It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to VMware vCenter 2.5 Update 4 prior to upgrading your ESX hosts.  Updates such as this one typically include a number of system improvements and also all of the patches available in-between it and the previous update available. Numerous driver additions and updates have been added to this update roll-up, including;

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips

In a previous article I discuss how an ESX host can halt if LUN metadata updates are done the same time a LUN path fails.  Thankfully VMware has released a patch for this problem, along with a few others.  I strongly suggest you to upgrade if your running VMware ESX 3.5 U3 and block level storage.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, Storage

After seeing a mention on Scott Lowe’s blog (blog.scottlowe.org) and on Storage Monkeys Blog (blogs.storagemonkeys.com) I’ve decided to discuss the issue(s) that I’ve came across in regards to disabling NFS Locking with the NFS.LockDisable=1 function.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware, VMware HA

This all started back about a year ago when I decided to move my datastores from Fibre Channel to NFS. The data was already on a NetApp FAS960c so I was enjoying thin provisioning and snapshots…but I wanted more!

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware, VMware HA