I'm having a serious problem with the patch. I patched one host and it was OK as I started machines on it, but then I see infinite loops of machine state changes from ON to RECONFIGURING and back to ON when I look at the latest hostd.log. They are coming from VirtualCenter Server, but I can't figure out why or how to stop it from happening. It's keeping hostd too busy to do anything else, so I can't move machines to that host.

We've rolled out the ESX patch to a handful of systems and things are looking good so far.

The ESXi version of the patch is giving us a problem - it complains that the patch metadata is missing and then fails to install. The metadata was updated when the patches were imported into UM and everything looks to be correct. We are investigating the issue more at our site. Anyone else with ESXi installable or embedded have any luck?

I have applied using Update Manager - as long as you can free up one host to put in maintenance mode you can do this without issue.

For esxupdate

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_esxupdate.pdf

Sounds good to me.

I am rebooting the host also, even though it isn't required.

I'm going to update my other 2 affected hosts tomorrow morning with the patch (one host now has the hotfix and appears fine).  I still have 2 other hosts in the cluster running Update 1.  Should I want for a new version of Update 2 to come out to patch them or just load the original U2 from Update Manager and this hotfix.  I'd like to get them all upgraded by this weekend.  We have an planned outage window Sat night and I was to get all the VMtools upgraded on the clients.

Thanks

Robert

We're using ESX 3.5 Update 2 on a 2 host test cluster running 25 VM's, i disabled HA and set DRS to manual. I downloaded the patch using the update manager and also downloaded the zip file. I extracted and copied the files to the first host and used esxupdate to manually apply the patch and everything worked great. Just to see how it would behave with the other host i scanned it for updates and then remediated. Update manager tried to put the host in maintenace mode and each VM failed to move @ 10%, I cancelled the maintenance mode task, and tried DRS @ partial and full automation with the same result.  Finally, powered off the VM's that were on that host and remediated again and it installed successfully. Re-enabled HA powered on all off VM's. I successfully manually migrated machines and try a test of HA in the morning

edit

added more info

Just applied the patch to my first ESX server, as I am entering maintenance mode in my second one, it is not migrating any VM's to my first ESX server.  I have a total of 6 hosts, and the remaining are getting quite full. 

In summary of patched ESX server, error is "HA agent on esx001.xxxx.xxx in cluster ESX Cluster in xxx has an error."  I am able to manually migrate to this box, but it is not moving automatically.

  I have tried to Reconfigure for VMware HA one time with no luck.  Any ideas?