SolutionOriented Blog: vSphere 4, Update 1 and ESXi

On November 19, 2009 VMware released Update 1 for vSphere 4.0 which, among other bug fixes and errata, adds the following new features:

ESX/ESXi
- VMware View 4.0 support (previously unsupported)
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support (previously "experimental") - guest customizations now supported
- Enhanced Clustering support for Microsoft Windows - adds support for VMware HA and DRS by allowing HA/DRS to be disabled per MSCS VM instead of per ESX host
- Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI support (pvSCSI boot disks now supported in Windows 2003/2008)
- Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch performance
- Increased vCPU per Core limit (raised from 20 to 25)
- Intel Xeon 3400 (uni-processor variant of the Nehalem)

vCenter Server
- Support for IBM DB2 (Enterprise, Workgroup and Express 9, Express C)
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support (previously "experimental") - guest customizations now supported

vCenter Update Manager
- Does not support IBM DB2
- Still no scan or remediate for Windows Server 2003 SP2/R2 64-bit, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7

vSphere Client
- Windows 7 officially supported (no more workaround hacks)

vSphere Command-Line Interface
- allows the use of comma-separated bulletins with --bundle option in "vihostupdate"

Authorized VMware users can download the necessary updates for vSphere Update 1 directly from VMware. For ESX and ESXi, updates can be managed and installed from the vCenter Update Manager within the vSphere Client. In addition to the normal backup procedure and those steps recommend by VMware, the following observations may be helpful to you:

DRS/HA cluster members CAN be updated auto-magically, however we observed very low end-to-end success rates in our testing lab. We recommend the following:
- Manually enter maintenance mode for the ESXi server
- Manually stage/remediate the patches to avoid conflicts
- Manually re-boot ESXi servers if they do not reboot on their own
- Re-scan patches when re-boot is complete, to check/confirm upgrade success
- Manually recover from maintenance mode and confirm HA host configuration

For the vSphere Client on Windows 7, completely remove the "hacked" version and clean-install the latest version (download from the updated ESX/ESXi server(s))

SOLORI's Notes: When upgrading ESXi "auto-magically" we experienced the following failures and unwanted behavior:

Update manager failure to stage pending updates and upgrades correctly, resulting in a "time-out" failure. However, updates are/were applied properly after manual reboot.

DRS/DPM conflicts with upgrade process:
- inadequate time given to servers for servers to recover from sleep mode
- Hosts sent to sleep while updates being evaluated, causing DRS to hold maintenance mode while sleeping hosts awakened, resulting in failed/time-out update process

Off-line VMs and templates not automatically migrated during update (maintenance mode) process causing extended unavailability of these assets during update

Additional Notes: Directed to the question of which updates/patches may or may not be "rolled-up" into this update, the release notes are very clear. However, for the sake of convenience, we repeat them here:

Patch Release ESX400-Update01 contains the following individual bulletins: