vSphere 5.5 Update 3 Patch Available

The Best Intentions

It was obvious and natural; the Right Thing to do.  In preparation for a deployment across all vSphere hosts we took the step of insuring the latest updates. And since we are running vSphere 5.5, this meant Update 3.

There was even some chest-thumping among our small team of generalists as they completed the task within short order.  And why not?

That was Short-Lived

Within 2 weeks we were crestfallen. Update 3 introduced a service-impacting defect involving seldom-used (sic) snapshots.  KB 2133118 was released to announce "unexpected signal: 11."  Consolidate or delete a snapshot and you may suffer a VM outage.

To be honest, I find the KB lacking in details--there are no specifics to indicate contributing factors or degree of impact across customers.

A New Hope?

While we haven't been impacted (whew!), I'm happy to see that today brings the release of patch ESXi550-201510401-BG to address this issue.

Fire up Update Manager and start patching!  Let us know how it goes, because I'm not sure that we wish to be first on this one.


2