ESXi 10-15-2014 Patches break Citrix Netscaler VPX Appliance

[russ79]

Part warning, part question....

My ESXi Hosts were v5.5.0 206190 (straight from the 5.5U2-RollupISO2 cd), I applied the following patches:

ID: ESXi550-201410101-SG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates esx-base

ID: ESXi550-201410401-BG  Impact: Critical  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates esx-base

ID: ESXi550-201410402-BG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates misc-drivers

ID: ESXi550-201410403-BG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates sata-ahci

ID: ESXi550-201410404-BG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates xhci-xhci

ID: ESXi550-201410405-BG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates tools-light

ID: ESXi550-201410406-BG  Impact: Important  Release date: 2014-10-15  Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates net-vmxnet3

afterwards they were v5.5.0 2143827

Once upgraded my 2 Citrix Netscaler VPX Appliances (vmware hardware version 8, Citrix Netscaler OS v10.5.52.11nc (latest), FreeBSD 64bit, E1000 Nic) stopped responding on the network. They work fine when on the older 5.5U2 release but start dropping packets intermittently and then ultimately drop off the network when migrated to a host that has the above listed patches. I have 2 in High Availability mode, this occurs even if just one is on and the other off. It goes back to normal when vmotioned back to the pre-patched host.

I've tried switching networks, removing and re-adding nics, upgrading to hardware 10, deleting them all together and deploying the latest version from citrix's website, if it doesn't drop off all together it will drop a lot of packets. You can watch the netscaler console show NODE FAIL, NODE DOWN, and NODE UP events many times a minute.

[aarshe]

i just applied the early december patch ESXi550-201412001.zip

i spent 2 hours frantically trying to figure out what broke the netscaler VM (well i figured it was the vmware patch, but what? )

untill thank god i found this thread.

the work around works on the dec 2014 patch i can confirm.

[ITSTS]

Great... so great...

yesterday we run into this issue... and had no idea what happens.

First we check all VLANs and the switch configurations.

After hours about thinking and searching... we come accross a failure in the logs... after looking at google we found this thread and your solution...

This works fine in hour environment... We are using ESXi 5.1U3 and Netscaler 10.5 Build 54.9NC

Thank you for sharing that with us.

[karps]

I had this issue moving from ESXi 5.1 U2 to U3. My symptoms were that the VPX drops off the network after ~ 12 hours.
I applied the above fix and the HA pair is syncing again. Thanks heaps!

[nsojka]

FYI.  The January 30th firmware release for Netscaler 10.5 fixes this issue.  We've been running well for almost a month on the newest firmware.  No firmware update for 10.1 yet.  Follow this thread for the latest on the Citrix side.

http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/357217-vmware-patch-update-10-15-2087359-causes-netscaler-vpx-to...

[rlondono75]

The temp fix also worked for me on ESXi 5.5 Build 2638301.

I have just updated the NetScaler VPX to 10.5 Build 56.15 and removed the temp fix and everything is working properly.