In case you’ve been at the beach this week (lucky you!), please feel free to read this letter regarding the problems this week with ESX 3.5 U2. Link: VMware: The Console: Letter from VMware CEO Paul Maritz.
Express patches were made available last night. Link: VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Patch Release – VMware.
The product team announced at 5:30 this morning that the files for the entire ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 release (ISOs, upgrade tar and zip files, and patch bundles) were now available at that same URL. Link: VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Patch Release – VMware.
I’ve seen a few reports of people on the communities of people not receiving email notifications of these releases, even though we sent them out to all VI customers. If you did not receive an email notification, it may be that your VMware Store account isn’t listed as owning a copy of VI, or that it went to your spam folder, or that you opted out of email notifications. I haven’t personally checked with the appropriate teams to see how one would go about rectifying the first situation, but if there’s any question let me know and I will track down the answer.
You may notice one oddity about the new releases. The version number that you’ll see in VirtualCenter or via the command line "vmware -v" is the version of the vmx RPM, which will be different if you applied the express patch than if you installed the reissued build. However, the build number of ESX or ESXi in the two paths is exactly the same (110268 for ESX and 110271 for ESXi). This is similar to a confusing aspect of our download pages, where we give the build number of the installer, and that number is different than the build numbers of the individual components. Think that’s confusing? We agree. As product manager MJ Lin explains in this Communities thread where she gives more details, "We are trying to move away from the build# scheme to prevent any confusion to customers."
