For the benefit of other VMware newbies like myself here's what I did to get the patch working:

Downloaded the express update when it became available (late btw) and added it to my ftp server's patch depot. Update took a bit likely due to server load from everyone else wanting in as well. (See http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_esxupdate.pdf if you are unfamiliar with esxupdate and patch depots).

While this all was downloaded I did an esxupdate -l query |grep ESX350-200806201-UG on both of my hosts to make sure the prerequisite patch was there. Also disabled HA on the cluster. I had already put DRS in manual mode early this morning.

After the patch was in my depot I did esxcfg-firewall --AllowOutgoing and then esxupdate -d <patch depot URL> scan to make sure it saw the new update.

One of my hosts only had 3 VMs running on it by chance so I shut down those 3 guests, set the hosts to enter maintenance mode and then ran esxupdate -d <patch depot> --test update to make sure all everything looked right on that host. When everything returned OK I did esxupdate -d <patch depot> update and waited for everything to finish. Per the patch instructions I restarted the management interface and then did esxcfg-firewall --BlockOutgoing . I then restarted the esx host that was in maintenance mode from VirtualCenter for good measure.

When this host came back up I took it out of maintenance mode, let it sit for a little bit while I checked logs for any errors. Then migrated all guest VMs from other unpatched host over to this patched host and then followed the same steps to patch the unpatched.

After both were patched I re-enabled DRS and balanced the host loads a bit. After waiting a few more minutes and checking logs some more I re-enabled HA which came up just fine.

Everything seem to work fine and basically I just RTFM on the directions to get everything to work. I didn't try patching with Update Manager as I've never really had that great of luck with it.

we are located in germany and have 17 hosts with 75 VMs on it. We have our productive SAP-System on the VMware and even our productive MS Exchange System. We have the release 103908, but i must say we were not really affected. As our machines are productive ones there are never powerd off or suspended. Therefore our VMs worked fine the whole time. This morning I remediated the first host to install the fix with Updatemanager and everything went fine. It took about 10 minutes. My luck was, that one of the hosts had no VMs on it. So i did this one first. Afterward I was able to migrate VMs from the other hosts to the patched host. So I will patch all 17 hosts without any downtime.

Sure, It was a really big failure from VMware to publish this bugy code, but in my opinion it was not as bad as most people are writing here. I think VMware has soved the problem proffesionally.

Kind regards

Patrick

Because I'm getting an error that the metadata are missing when I want to scan a host.

can someone explain me how to apply the patch to the esx hosts, if maintenance mode is needed but vmotion does not work, so the guest machines cannot moved away from the host? I started the update process, using the update manager, but now one host wants to go into maintenance mode and tries to move all guest machines away, but all theses tries run into timeouts. I cancelled the update process now and i'm still waiting for the cancel process is finished

best regards

Thomas

Regards,
Bastian

your need one host free of VMs und have to fix this host first. Perhaps you can power down a view not so important VMs? After you have one host fixed you can use the vmotion to fix the other host. On me farm with 17 hosts everythink worked fine with the update manager. I had the luck, that one host was without VMs so I could start directly.