don’t roll vmware update 2 … yet (updated – fixed!)

if you’ve had the displeasure of applying update 2, here’s what you’re in for.

An issue has been uncovered with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 that causes the product license to expire on August 12. VMware engineering has isolated the root cause of this issue and will reissue the various upgrade media including the ESX 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESXi 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESX 3.5 Update 2 upgrade tar and zip files in the next 36 hours (by noon, August 13, PST). They will be available from the page: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi. Until then, we advise against upgrading to ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

The Update patch bundles will be released separately later in the week.

The issue is being tracked on KB 1006716 on http://kb.vmware.com/.

WHAT TO DO:

Reference this community article and have them reset your ESX clocks back.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/162377?tstart=0

The work-around: turn off NTP (if you're using it), and then manually set the date of all ESX 3.5u2 hosts back to 10th of August. This can be done either through the VI Client (Host -> Configuration -> Time Configuration) or by typing date -s "08/10/2008" at the Service Console command line on the ESX hosts.

if it weren’t for the fact that someone is going to be in hell fixing this, it would be pretty funny. imagine if your guests are syncing time with your esx servers. let’s say you set that clock back. guess what? so do your guests… and if you don’t know it, kerberos requires time differences of < 5 mins. that means your clients are no longer capable of authenticating with active directory (unless you set that back, too). of course, if you do that, then all of your users will complain that their clocks are wrong. your emails still stamp funny, etc, etc, etc.

now if you have your guests syncing to ntp or ad or something, you should be in the clear.

 

UPDATE:

We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for more information.
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.

The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:
This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine's date and time are set correctly.

There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.