Update

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 VM’s spontaneously reboot.

A week ago i upgraded a customers environment to VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 and VC 2.5 Update 3. After the upgrade some Virtual Machines (VM) spontaneously rebooted. After investing the problem we saw that after a VMotion action the spontaneously reboot occurred.

We disabled in HA the option “Virtual Machine Monitoring” and set DRS to manual.  The problem with Virtual Machine monitoring is:

The Virtual Machine heartbeats are being dropped which is triggered by Vmotion and the VM gets reset by the HA feature as it thinks it has gone offline. Since the feature is now off it should be safe to turn on DRS again.

 

There are more people who have this problem, read the following post on the VMware forum, 3.5U3 – any guinea pigs yet?.

I made a support request @ VMware. The told me today that 20 November patch 10 for VMware 3.5 Update 3 will be released. Patch 10 fixes SOME random reboot problems in Update 3. I hope it resolves this nasty issue.

VMware ESX/ESXi Update 3 released

VMware has released Update 3 for ESX/ESXi.

This new release of ESX/ESXi 3.5 comes with the following enhancements:

  • Increase number of vCPUs per Core Limit (from 8 to 20)
  • New supported servers, NICs and storage IO controllers
  • New supported Guest Operating Systems

… and many more improvements and bug fixes.

Please refer to the product release notes for the details on improvements and bug fixes. These
can be found at:

ESX Server 3.5 Update 3 Release Notes

ESXi Server 3.5 Update 3 Embedded Release Notes

ESXi Server 3.5 Update 3 Installable Release Notes

VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 is available for download at: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/.

VMware patch available for the product license to expire on 12 august 2008

VMware has released a patch for VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware ESX 3.5i.

1.Read the following Knowledge Base articles first:

Fix of virtual machine power on failure issue, refer to KB 1006716

For VI 3.5, refer to KB 1006721 for deployment consideration and instruction

For VI3.5i, refer to KB 1006670 for deployment consideration and instruction

2. Download and apply the patch according to the product(s) you have:

VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Patch | VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 Patch