Hanley

If you've installed update 2 on ESX 3.5 then you may notice some serious problems now the clock has changed to the 12th August.

VMware Communities: BIG bug in ESX 3.5 Update 2 - If you're ...

We've got the problem here, have to disable NTP and reset the date on the host to the 10th!!

druddle

Got this from VMWare today...

We recently encountered an issue around early license expiration for upgrade versions of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Licenses for some customers and partners failed to power on or VMotion as of yesterday, August 12, 2008.
VMware addressed the problem by sending an email to all customers instructing them to download a patch. So far the patches have been an effective solution to this issue.
For your information, we have included the following communications sent to customers from VMware yesterday afternoon and late last night. If your customer has questions, please direct them to the VMware support page where they can locate information on downloading the patch.
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.
The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:
This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine's date and time are set correctly. There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site.
Module License Power on failed.
Affected Products:
* VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2
* The problem will be seen if ESX350-200806201-UG is applied to a system
* No other VMware products are affected
Resolution:
We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Patch Release - VMware for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see the KB articles for deployment information regarding Update Manager.
The KB articles are kept up-to-date. Please refer to the KB articles for information and updates.
In our last update, we referred to an initiative by our support and engineering teams to find an option to apply the patch without the necessity of entering maintenance mode and VMotion of VM’s to other servers, or VM power-off and re-power-on. Our earlier tests have not found a consistently successful way to address this. We continue to investigate this possibility, as we know that it would reduce the maintenance burden on our customers who may not have a patched server available for VMotion.
We are on target to release updated versions of the ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 patch at 6 PM PST today. This is for customers who have not already upgraded to the previously released version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

Dave

Hanley

Yeah we sorted this on Wednesday night

All 20 hosts patched manually using esxupdate - the update manager version wasn't available / hadn't been tested.

All good fun