ESXi 4.1 Patch ESXi410-201011401

[mnisadmin]

Hi,

we have ESXi 4.1 patch 20101001 and I noticed patch 201011401 is critical with issues with Broadcom bnx2x NIC

we have proliant DL 380 G6 with Broadcom NC382i NIC cards.

I want to know if I need to install the update or is it only for the mentioned NIC ???

Will there be any harm if I install the patch ???     

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your NICs are using the bnx2 driver (not the bnx2x) so that component will not likely be changing in this patch.  Patching ESXi is fairly safe but you will be replacing the entire firmware image so in essense you will be running a newer version of ESXi.  There is the other issue noted on the patch for x64 Windows VMs that you may want to consider as well.

[mnisadmin]

HI Dave,

thanks for the reply.

Can you please advise what sort of issues are known with with windows 64 bit.

if there are known issues and our NICS are not affected by the patch/bug then may be I should not apply the patch

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The kb article  - kb.vmware.com/kb/1029398 - describles this issue: •If a 64-bit Windows virtual machine that uses software techniques for instruction set virtualization or Binary Translation (BT) is resumed from the suspended state or is migrated to an ESX 4.1 host, the virtual machine might stop responding, and the Microsoft Windows Event Logs might display error messages similar to the following: .NET Runtime .NET Runtime version * Fatal Execution Engine Error * Application Error: Faulting application name: oobe.exe * Faulting module name: mscorwks.dll * Exception code: 0xc00000005 If you don't have an issue with that then I would wait.  Sit back and enjoy the holidays 🙂