As always, make sure you have adequate backups and test all patches in your test environment before deploying to production systems.

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New ESX and ESXI 4.0 Patches today

As always, make sure you have adequate backups and test all patches in your test environment before deploying to production systems.

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New ESX and ESXI 3.5 Patches today

My first thought was that this probably would introduce some performance issues, but then it hit me that this would cause the incorrect VMware Tools to get installed in the VM, leading to all sorts of unintended behaviors. Even worse, if the correct MCA/MCE architecture is not presented to the guest during boot I don’t think it will start at all. We use guest OS type to get this info (it only matters during boot as far as I know).

How to fix it:

1. Power off the VM.
2. Modify via GUI option General of the properties of your VM.
3. Power on the VM.
4. Reinstall the correct VMware Tools.

Anybody know of any more gotchas associated with having the wrong OS type specified for your VM?

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Impact of wrong OS type for VMs

Customers who are using VMware vSphere ESX 4.0 and are wanting to install update 1, via VMware Update Manager (VUM).

Problem description:

Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 using VUM fails or times out. Rebooting host results in a PSOD and the host has to be re-installed.

Workaround:

Please disable any 3rd party hardware monitoring agents running on the ESX 4.0.0 server before applying the update.

Customers that have already run into this issue and have installed the update but have not rebooted, need to contact Support.

The 3rd party agents can be enabled again after the upgrade is completed.

ESX 4.0 U1 is no longer available for download.

For additional details, see Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 using Update Manager fails or times out and rebooting the host results in a purple diagnostics screen (1016070).

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Upgrading ESX 4.0 to Update 1 using Update Manager

In addition to the recipes, VMware Cookbook includes background information to help you determine your virtualization needs. You’ll come to view VMware as part of the real environment, alongside operating systems, storage, and logical and physical network components.

• Follow best practices for installing VMware in your environment
• Discover how to secure and monitor your network
• Understand disk storage implementation and configuration
• Learn resource management using the distributed resource scheduler, shares, and resource pools
• Configure logical and physical networks
• Learn how to clone and migrate servers
• Gain valuable tips for configuration and fine-tuning

Many resources can teach you about virtualization and the basics of VMware. This book is for system administrators who are ready to go beyond an introduction.

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VMware Cookbook

• crash debug screen
• machine crash screen
• ESX Server PSOD
• Purple screen crash report
• Decode purple screen error

Guess what? VMware’s own document standards prevent us from using any of these phrases in the articles, and Google isn’t smart enough to know a PSOD really means a Decoding Machine Check Exception. So instead of finding the best information you really need at that moment, you get a ton of 3rd party information.

Our community forums don’t have as strict rules about terminology so I have just created this post:

ESX Server PSOD

in hopes it ranks well and directs customers to the information they need on ESX purple screens.

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ESX PSODs

“VMware Go™ is the latest innovation we’ve brought to market as part of our ongoing commitment to helping SMB customers run their applications with more agility, profitability, and resilience,” said Dan Chu, vice president, emerging products and markets at VMware.  “Nearly every SMB stands to benefit tremendously from virtualization.  VMware Go™ will simplify virtualization for SMBs to a few easy online steps and was designed with SMBs in mind.  We want SMBs who may be sitting on the fence to realize all the benefits of virtualization without burdening their limited IT resources.” 

VMware Go™ is a free web-based service that will enable SMB customers to fly through the ESXi setup process with just a few mouse clicks.  The award-winning VMware ESXi is the industry’s most widely deployed hypervisor, with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.  VMware ESXi, also available for free, allows companies to reduce overhead and simplify business operations by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, spending less money on hardware, power and cooling, and server administration. VMware ESXi together with VMware Go is an on-ramp for companies new to virtualization, especially small businesses who may not think they have the time or budget to get started.

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VMware Go™: free web management for ESXi

In some cases, the information that would normally be in the /tmp directory of the untarred vm-support output will instead be located in:

/usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/downloads

From what I’ve heard, this does not happen in all instances, and /tmp will be populated with the files that we have learned to expect from the ESX 3 family.

There is one more odd-ball to this mystery, where it is suggested that running vm-support from the COS vs from vSphere Client will result in different behavior, again, I have not verified this. It may or may not be related to where the script run is triggered, or instead by other circumstances unrelated to how the script was called.

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ESX 4 vm-support script

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX Server 3.5 hosts.

To update ESX Server 3.5 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the most recent patch bundle from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html and install the bundle using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.

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ESX Patches

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