I have a funny scenario that came up last week with the update 2 patch, and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen similar issues. We began upgrading our 3.0.2 ESX clusters to 3.5 at the beginning of June. At that time I created a baseline called "production". It is a fixed baseline, that includes all patches released up until 1 June. I have used this baseline on all of our clusters as they have been upgraded (actually re-installed). The installation procedure was to install from a 3.5u1 CD, then run update manager to apply the patches in the "production" baseline.
There were 3 clusters that were re-installed after July 25 (when the original, broken update 2 patch was pushed out). Those 3 clusters all had the broken, time-bombed patch installed, even though it is not part of the baseline. I didn't know the patch was there until D-day, when those clusters stopped working (lucky for me they were low-use clusters). I patched two of them, then actually rebuilt the third cluster (trying to find out if I could just get to a point without those patches installed at all). When I patched that third cluster, the new, updated patch got installed. So there appears to be no way to apply a baseline (at least my baseline) without also getting this update too.
So that raises two questions for me:
1. Has anyone else seen this behavior, where these patches are installed even though they are not part of your baseline? I'm being told by VMware support that no one else is reporting this as a problem.
2. If this is a problem, does it cause anyone else major concern? I'm also being told that this isn't a major issue for VMware (mostly because of the lack of calls, but also because "the timebomb bug is fixed, right?"). However, I am very concerned that VMware seems to have decided to push this patch to customers using update manager, with no way to disable pushing this patch. I wanted a consistent build across all my servers, but I can't get to that now without going back and applying this patch to all my hosts. On top of that, none of these patches were tested in our environment before getting rolled out.
I guess I'm just frustrated because VMware seems to say that there is an issue (I have an open ticket with them), but this isn't a big deal to them, so they don't know when they will work on it. So I wanted to find out if I'm the only one with a problem, and if I'm the only one worried about what other patches VMware may decide to push to my servers without my selecting them.
