ESX Server 3 Update 4 (roll-up) Released

ESX350-Update04 - UPDATE

This release requires a VMware Tools update and subsequent reboot of affected Windows systems. Resulting update changes ESX build number to 153875.

Expanded features:

• VMXNET driver enhancements for W2K3


• EVC for Xeon 5500 series


• LSI megaraid_sas and mptscsi updates - improves performance and enhances event handling capabilities


• Additional Guest OS Support
  
  
  
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (32/64-bit)
  
  
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (32/64-bit)
  
  
  • Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop/Server Editions (32/64-bit)
  
  
  • Windows PE 2.0 (32/64-bit)
  
  
  
  


• New SATA and SAS controller support
  
  
  
  • PCM 8011
  
  
  • Intel ICH9 & ICH10
  
  
  • CERC 6/I SATA/SAS RAID
  
  
  • HP SmartArray P700m
  
  
  • (storing VMFS on native SATA still not supported)
  
  
  
  


• Lots of new 10Gbps NICs supported


• Adds E1000 support for Netware 5 & 6

Important Fixes:

• VMotion freeze (momentary) on RVI-enabled AMD hosts


• Random failures with W2K guests and PAE


• Unnamed instabilities for 64-bit SMP guests


• E1000 now default NIC for Solaris 9 & 10 32-bit


• Firewall now supports FTP passive mode


• Guest OS and RDM communications


• Storage VMotion temporary snapshots

Notes of interest:

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Disk Arrays Cannot Be Added as Raw Device Mapping Disks Using the VI Client
When using the VI Client to create virtual machines on raw device mapping disks or add a hard disk to a virtual machine, the Raw Device Mapping option is disabled in the New Virtual Machine Wizard, and in the Add Hardware Wizard.

Workaround: To add SAS disk arrays as raw device mapping disks:

1. Run a command with the following syntax in the ESX Server service console:
   # vmkfstools -r <raw_device_path> -a <bus_type> <RDM_file_name>


2. Use the Add Hardware Wizard to add the newly created virtual disk as an existing disk, to the virtual machine.

For details on the update, see the VMware update release notes.