VMware ESXi 5.1 Patches Released

Hot off the presses are some ESXi 5.1 patches. This build of ESXi 5.1 (1157734) fixes several bugs and more importantly addresses some security issues. As always in any environment, please test out the patches thoroughly before putting them into production. Each environment is unique, and issues may surface that could cause you some headaches. These bug fixes aren’t earth shattering, so I would not suggest rushing them out to production systems.

ESXi 5.1 Build 1157734

Highlights of the patch bundle included in this release are:

Black frames might appear around text boxes in an application running on Virtual Machine Hardware Version 8 or later. This issue occurs on virtual machines with Windows 7 guest operating system and View 5.0 PCoIP.
For two ESXi hosts with different host names, identical machine names are generated in the domain controller under certain conditions. As a result, the ctive Directory functionality is lost for one of the two ESXi hosts.
After you upgrade to ESXi 5.1 from an earlier version, attempts to power on a virtual machine with static MAC address outside the allowed range (00:50:56:[00-3f] or 00:50:56:[80-BF]) fail with the following error message: The MAC address entered is not in the valid range.
If a physical NIC is named using non-standard naming conventions (other than vmnic#) and is added to a vSwitch, host profile creation fails with the following error message: Invalid value chosen for active NICs.
ESXi 5.1 hosts might get disconnected randomly from the vCenter Server system. This issue might occur if the heartbeat thread in the vpxa agent does not receive a response from the futex_wait system call. As a result, the heartbeat thread stops responding, and the vCenter Server does not receive heartbeat messages from the ESXi hosts for several hours.
Upon reboot, ESXi 5.1 hosts configured to obtain DNS configuration and host name from a DHCP server displays its host name as localhost in syslog rather than displaying the host name obtained from the DHCP server. As a result, for a remote syslog collector, all ESXi hosts appear to be the same, with the same host name.
To prevent buffer overflow, the HPSA proc node truncates LUN details on an ESXi host.
This patch updates the esx-base VIB to resolve a stability issue.

As always, you can down the ESXi patches from here. The full KB article for the patch bundle is here.