Download VMware ESXi 6.5 Update 1 Express Patch 4

Virtualization has gained a prominent place in recent years. Well-known names include Xen and VMware. VMware’s complete platform is called vSphere and consists of several components, such as vCenter Server, which can manage a complete virtual environment, and of course the hypervisor ESXi, on which virtual machines can do their work. A few days ago, patch release ESXi650-201710401, or ESXi version 6.5 Update 1 Express Patch 4, was released. This mainly fixes a problem in the vSan component. The corresponding patch notes look like this:

VMware ESXi 6.5, Patch Release ESXi650-201710401 (2151081)

NOTE: This patch release contains a fix for a rare but highly critical vSAN bug. For more information, see KB 2151061. The vSAN issue outlined in KB 2151061 manifests itself only under highly specific operations and IO patterns.

Users with the following vSAN versions and configuration must upgrade immediately to this patch release:

• All-Flash configurations with deduplication enabled, and any of the following ESXi and vSAN versions: 6.5 and vSAN version 6.6 and 6.6.1.

Summaries and Symptoms

This patch updates esx-base, esx-tboot, vsan, and vsanhealth VIBs to resolve the following issues:

• For vSAN All-Flash configurations with deduplication enabled you might see the following two vSphere Observations (VOBs) in the Events tab:
  “vSAN detected an unrecoverable medium or checksum error for component uuid on disk group uuid.” and “vSAN detected and fixed a medium or checksum error for component uuid on disk group uuid.”
  In addition, you might encounter IO read errors and in some cases severe symptoms such as inaccessible VMs, host failures, or stuck resyncs. The issue manifests itself only under highly specific operations and IO patterns.
  If you have seen the above messages, please call VMware Global Support Services immediately.
  Notwithstanding, all vSAN customers using All-Flash with deduplication enabled must upgrade to this patch release immediately.
• Due to a race condition between a parent and a child, during a fork() system call, a file opened by a child in Exclusive mode might fail with an error Device or resource busy. Automated Pool Provisioning in VMware Horizon 7 might fail if you use vSAN 6.6.1. With this fix, vSAN 6.6.1 will be supported with VMware Horizon 7.
• Applications with large numbers of threads might hang after a fork() system call on locking operations due to stale data.
• An ESXi host might fail with a purple diagnostic screen due to a page fault exception in the CPU scheduler with a log similar to this:
  2017-06-04T02:02:19.812Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bc60:[0x41802e2c161d]CpuSched_PcpuChoose@vmkernel#nover+0xc5 stack: 0x0
  2017-06-04T02:02:19.812Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bcb0:[0x41802e2d5939]CpuSchedRebalance_PcpuMigrateIdle@vmkernel#nover+0x17d stack: 0x70aec092a0ca9
  2017-06-04T02:02:19.813Z cpu68:111716)0x43a22321bd80:[0x41802e2c6f51]CpuSchedDispatch@vmkernel#nover+0x1331 stack: 0x410000000001.
  This issue is most often seen in HPE Superdome systems with Intel v3 or Intel v4 processors.