ESXi Patches fix VSS, NTP and VMkernel

Two patches were made available on May 27, 2010 for ESXi 4.0 to fix certain bugs and security vulnerabilities in the platform. These patches are identified as ESXi400-201005401-SG and ESXi400-201005402-BG.

The first patch is security related and requires a reboot of the ESXi host:

This patch fixes a security issue. The updated NTP daemon fixes a flaw in the way it handled certain malformed NTP packets. The NTP daemon logged information about all such packets and replied with a NTP packet that was treated as malformed when received by another ntpd. A remote attacker could use this flaw to create an NTP packet reply loop between two ntpd servers through a malformed packet with a spoofed source IP address and port, causing ntpd on those servers to use excessive amounts of CPU time and fill disk space with log messages. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-3563 to this issue.

ESXi 4.0 hosts might stop responding when interrupts are shared between VMkernel and service console. You might also observe the following additional symptoms:

• Network pings to the ESXi hosts might fail.


• Baseboard management controllers (BMC) such as HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) console might appear to be in a non-responsive state.

- VMware KB Article, 1021041

An interesting note is the reference to the service console in ESXi, however the sharing of interrupts between ESX drivers and the service console has long been a problem in ESX (not ESXi since there is no service console)... The second patch does not require a reboot, although it includes an update to VMware Tools which could impact uptime on affected virtual machines (Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7). The KB article says this about the patch:

The VMware Snapshot Provider service is not listed in the Services panel. The quiesced snapshots do not use VMware Tools VSS components in Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 operating systems. This issue is seen when the user or backup software performs a quiesced snapshot on virtual machines on ESXi 4.0 hosts. This patch fixes the issue.

- VMware KB Article, 1021042

Since VSS quiescence is at issue here, DR snapshots and backups relying on VMware Data Recovery may be unreliable without the new VMware Tools installed. If your systems rely on VMware Data Recovery APIs for backup, this patch should be considered mandatory.