News

VMware ESX Patches 11/20/2007

VMware released 4 new patches for esx 3.0.1, and 3 patches for esx 3.0.2 today. I've updated the patchlist.txt files accordingly, which you can find in the usual places.

Happy patching!

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Tuesday, November 20, 2007.

New patches for esx 3.0.2 released 10/29/2007

Finally some patching news worth reporting for ESX.

The first item is that there are new patches out for ESX 3.0.2. This patch release put 7 new patches out there, most of which were just to support new hardware. I've updated the patchlist.txt for ESX 3.0.2 and the new patchlist.txt that has been trimmed to remove patches that are already superceded which can shave some time of installing a new host.

The bigger news item is that VMware has decided to start releasing quarterly updates 'rollups', much like the RedHat distribution mechanism, so we've now got VMware ESX 3.0.2 U1 in the wild. Why is this big news? Currently for an ESX 3.0.1 install, it takes me about 7 minutes to install the system, and then another 28 minutes to install 56 patches to the system. Just installing the 56 patches to a system that is already in place can take almost an hour on a HP DL585 with 8 cores. This will allow you to update the RPMs on your build server so that instead of patching, you can simply vMotion all of your guests to another host, rebuild the host in a matter of minutes and then vmotion the guests back on to the host. VMware still plans to release incremental patches in between the quarterly updates so that those of us with strict patching requirements will still be able to keep the latest security holes close until the next quarterly update.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Thursday, November 01, 2007.