Hi everyone – thought I’d throw this up here. Just got back from a nice vacation so I had been away and not doing a whole lot with IT stuff!

On 07 July 2015, VMware released their ESXi 6.0.0b patch. The release notes are available here.

As you may or may not know, I run vSphere 6.0 in my home lab (on a Lenovo TS140 that has been built up as well as a Dell R710). I’ve had a couple issues while using vSphere 6. One of my issues was that I had weirdness setting up NTP during installation and I’ve also had issues with the being able to monitor hardware status from within vCenter Server. It seems as though VMware is considering both of these issues fixed, so that’s good.

My Lenovo TS140 host would stop reporting hardware status after ~20 – 30 days of up-time. I’m not sure what exactly causes it to stop reporting status. VMware identifies this issue, somewhat vaguely, as involving a memory leak based around CIM providers and Small-Footprint CIM Broker (sfcb) services. I didn’t dig too deep into my issue when it’d happen as I only had the host up for about 60 – 65 days on vSphere 6.0 GA. It was annoying, though, because I could not see my LSI controller status (or any status at all) through the “Hardware Status” tab in vCenter. A reboot would fix it, but that’s a hassle since my firewall/router is virtualized along with my DC (DNS), etc.

Installing the patch was easy. If you’re using VMware Update Manager the patch will be available through the VMware depot. I don’t have my two hosts in a cluster and therefore don’t use VUM since vCenter will go down with the host. So, I simply downloaded the update (ESXi600-201507001.zip), SCP’d it over to my host (/var/tmp) and then SSH’d into each host and ran:

esxcli software vib update –depot=/var/lib/ESXi600-201507001.zip

The console will hesitate for a second and then indicate that a whole bunch of packages were updated and indicate that the system needs a reboot:

Once you reboot and have the host back up you will notice that the versioning is updated (note that the capture below was when patching a Dell host, not my Lenovo hence the image profile):

And, when you’re all up and running on ESXi 6.0.0b you should be able to see your hardware status as well:

I have had the server up for about 18 hours after applying the patch. Everything seems to work well including my LSI SMIS provider so that I can manipulate the RAID controller from a remote machine. I’ve successfully patched 3 machines without issue. I will update this post should further issues arise.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

Edit: I forgot to mention that you should also upgrade your vCenter Server to 6.0.0b as well. For the Windows installation, you need to download the ISO from VMware labeled VMware-VIMSetup-all-6.0.0-2800571.iso noting that the last number there is the installer build version which correlates to 6.0.0b. It’s just a matter of mounting the ISO and running the autorun and letting it do an update. You can also use this ISO for a fresh install as well.

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