Short-Take: Clock Ticking on VI 3.5 Updates, June 1 Deadline

If you’re still not quite ready to upgrade from VI 3.x to vSphere, time may be running out on your ESX hosts to stay “current” inside of VI3 unless you act before June 1, 2011. If your VMware VI3 hosts have not been patched since November of 2010, you are at risk for losing update/patching capabilities unless you apply ESX350-201012410-BG before the deadline. This patch ONLY addresses the expiring secure key on the ESX host which will otherwise become invalid on June 1, 2011.

If you need to bring your hosts current (without upgrading to vSphere) the last full patch release from VMware for VI 3.5 addresses the following issues:

Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series – Support for the Intel Xeon processor 3400 series has been added. Support includes Enhanced VMotion capabilities. For additional information on previous processor families supported by Enhanced VMotion, see Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (KB 1003212).

Driver Update for Broadcom bnx2 Network Controller – The driver for bnx2 controllers has been upgraded to version 1.6.9. This driver supports bootcode upgrade on bnx2 chipsets and requires bmapilnx and lnxfwnx2 tools upgrade from Broadcom. This driver also adds support for Network Controller – Sideband Interface (NC-SI) for SOL (serial over LAN) applicable to Broadcom NetXtreme 5709 and 5716 chipsets.

Driver Update for LSI SCSI and SAS Controllers – The driver for LSI SCSI and SAS controllers is updated to version 2.06.74. This version of the driver is required to provide a better support for shared SAS environments.

Newly Supported Guest Operating Systems – Support for the following guest operating systems has been added specifically for this release:

For more complete information about supported guests included in this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software.

• Windows 7 Enterprise (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Web Server (64-bit)
• Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu Server 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Newly Supported Management Agents – See VMware ESX Server Supported Hardware Lifecycle Management Agents for current information on supported management agents.

Newly Supported Network Cards – This release of ESX Server supports HP NC375T (NetXen) PCI Express Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter.

Newly Supported SATA Controllers – This release of ESX Server supports the Intel Ibex Peak SATA AHCI controller.

Note:

Some limitations apply in terms of support for SATA controllers. For more information, see SATA Controller Support in ESX 3.5. (KB 1008673) Storing VMFS datastores on native SATA drives is not supported.

This patch comes with a roll-up approach that VMware describes this way:

Note: As part of the end of availability for some VMware Virtual Infrastructure product releases, the ESX 3.5 Update 5 upgrade package ESX350-Update05.zip has been replaced by ESX350-Update05a.zip in order to remove dependencies upon patches that will no longer be available for download. Hosts upgraded using ESX350-Update05a.zip are equivalent to those upgraded using the older package, but patch bundles released before ESX 3.5 Update 5 will not be required during the upgrade process.