ESXi 7.0 Update 1c | 17 DEC 2020 | ISO Build 17325551 Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's in the Release Notes

The release notes cover the following topics:

• What's New
• Earlier Releases of ESXi 7.0
• Patches Contained in this Release
• Product Support Notices
• Resolved Issues
• Known Issues

What's New

• ESXi 7.0 Update 1c supports vSphere Quick Boot on the following servers:
  • Cisco Systems Inc:
    • HX240C-M5SD
    • HXAF240C-M5SD
    • UCSC-C240-M5SD
  • Dell Inc:
    • PowerEdge C6420
    • PowerEdge C6525
    • PowerEdge FC640
    • PowerEdge M640
    • PowerEdge MX740c
    • PowerEdge MX840c
    • PowerEdge R540
    • PowerEdge R6515
    • PowerEdge R6525
    • PowerEdge R7515
    • PowerEdge R7525
    • PowerEdge R840
    • PowerEdge R930
    • PowerEdge R940
    • PowerEdge R940xa
  • HPE:
    • ProLiant DL385 Gen10

• ESXi 7.0 Update 1c adds five physical NIC statistics: droppedRx, droppedTx, errorsRx, RxCRCErrors and errorsTx, to the hostd.log file at /var/run/log/hostd.log to enable you detect uncorrected networking errors and take necessary corrective action.

• With ESXi 7.0 Update 1c, you can use the --remote-host-max-msg-len parameter to set the maximum length of syslog messages, to up to 16 KiB, before they must be split. By default, the ESXi syslog daemon (vmsyslogd), strictly adheres to the maximum message length of 1 KiB set by RFC 3164. Longer messages are split into multiple parts. Set the maximum message length up to the smallest length supported by any of the syslog receivers or relays involved in the syslog infrastructure.

• With ESXi 7.0 Update 1c, you can use the installer boot option systemMediaSize to limit the size of system storage partitions on the boot media. If your system has a small footprint that does not require the maximum 138 GB system-storage size, you can limit it to the minimum of 33 GB. The systemMediaSize parameter accepts the following values:

  The selected value must fit the purpose of your system. For example, a system with 1TB of memory must use the minimum of 69 GB for system storage. To set the boot option at install time, for example systemMediaSize=small, refer to Enter Boot Options to Start an Installation or Upgrade Script. For more information, see VMware knowledge base article 81166.

  • min (33 GB, for single disk or embedded servers)
  • small (69 GB, for servers with at least 512 GB RAM)
  • default (138 GB)
  • max (consume all available space, for multi-terabyte servers)

Earlier Releases of ESXi 7.0

Features, resolved and known issues of ESXi are described in the release notes for each release. Release notes for earlier releases of ESXi 7.0 are:

• VMware ESXi 7.0, Patch Release ESXi 7.0 Update 1b
• VMware ESXi 7.0, Patch Release ESXi 7.0 Update 1a
• VMware ESXi 7.0, Patch Release ESXi 7.0 Update 1
• VMware ESXi 7.0, Patch Release ESXi 7.0b

For internationalization, compatibility, and open source components, see the VMware vSphere 7.0 Release Notes.

Patches Contained in This Release

This release of ESXi 7.0 Update 1c delivers the following patches:

Build Details

Download Filename:	VMware-ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-depot.zip
Build:	17325551
Download Size:	523.2 MB
md5sum:	d1410e6c741ada23c3570e07b94bd8c7
sha1checksum:	a70defe8353b39f74339b158697ed1a12df6c55d
Host Reboot Required:	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required:	Yes

IMPORTANT:

• Starting with vSphere 7.0, VMware uses components for packaging VIBs along with bulletins. The ESXi and esx-update bulletins are dependent on each other. Always include both in a single ESXi host patch baseline or include the rollup bulletin in the baseline to avoid failure during host patching.

• When patching ESXi hosts by using the vSphere Lifecycle Manager from a version earlier than ESXi 7.0 Update 1, it is strongly recommended to use the rollup bulletin in the patch baseline. If you cannot use the rollup bulletin, make sure to include all of the following packages in the patching baseline. If the following packages are not included in the baseline, the update operation fails:

  • VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-NVMeoF-RDMA_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher

Components

Component	Bulletin ID	Category	Severity
ESXi	ESXi_7.0.1-0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Critical
ESXi Install/Upgrade Component	esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Critical
VMWare ATA Storage Controller Driver	VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Moderate
HPE Smart Array Controller Driver	HPE-nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Moderate
VMWare USB Driver	VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Moderate
Microsemi Storage Solution Smart Array Storage Controller Driver	Microchip-smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551	Bugfix	Moderate
ESXi	ESXi_7.0.1-0.20.17325020	Security	Critical
ESXi Install/Upgrade Component	esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020	Security	Critical
VMWare ATA Storage Controller Driver	VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020	Security	Important
VMware NVMe over Fabric - RDMA Driver	VMware-NVMeoF-RDMA_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020	Security	Important
VMware native Software FCoE Driver	VMware-vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020	Security	Important
VMWare USB Driver	VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020	Security	Important

Rollup Bulletin

This rollup bulletin contains the latest VIBs with all the fixes after the initial release of ESXi 7.0.

Bulletin ID	Category	Severity
ESXi70U1c-17325551	Bugfix	Critical

Image Profiles

VMware patch and update releases contain general and critical image profiles. Application of the general release image profile applies to new bug fixes.

Image Profile Name

ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-standard

ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-no-tools

ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-standard

ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-no-tools

ESXi Image

Name and Version	Release Date	Category	Detail
ESXi70U1c-17325551	12/17/2020	Enhancement	Security and Bugfix image
ESXi70U1sc-17325020	12/17/2020	Enhancement	Security only image

For information about the individual components and bulletins, see the Product Patches page and the Resolved Issues section.

Patch Download and Installation

In vSphere 7.x, the Update Manager plug-in, used for administering vSphere Update Manager, is replaced with the Lifecycle Manager plug-in. Administrative operations for vSphere Update Manager are still available under the Lifecycle Manager plug-in, along with new capabilities for vSphere Lifecycle Manager.
The typical way to apply patches to ESXi 7.x hosts is by using the vSphere Lifecycle Manager. For details, see About vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines and Images.
You can also update ESXi hosts without using the Lifecycle Manager plug-in, and use an image profile instead. To do this, you must manually download the patch offline bundle ZIP file from the VMware download page or the Product Patches page and use the esxcli software profile update command.
For more information, see the Upgrading Hosts by Using ESXCLI Commands and the VMware ESXi Upgrade guide.

Product Support Notices

VMware Tools 9.10.x and 10.0.x has reached End of General Support. For more details, refer to VMware Tools listed under the VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix.

Resolved Issues

The resolved issues are grouped as follows.

• ESXi_7.0.1-0.25.17325551
• esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551
• VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551
• HPE-nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551
• VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551
• Microchip-smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551
• ESXi_7.0.1-0.20.17325020
• esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020
• VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
• VMware-NVMeoF-RDMA_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
• VMware-vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
• VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
• ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-standard
• ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-no-tools
• ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-standard
• ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-no-tools
• ESXi Image - ESXi70U1c-17325551
• ESXi Image - ESXi7.0U1sc-17325020

ESXi_7.0.1-0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Critical
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	2656093, 2652863, 2653874, 2643508, 2644189, 2652344, 2661064, 2667291, 2662512, 2644221, 2662606, 2661153, 2655181, 2657411, 2675442, 2657649, 2662558, 2661818, 2664084, 2625155, 2658647, 2659015, 2654686, 2664278, 2676632, 2647557, 2647557, 2628899, 2663717, 2633194, 2661808, 2670891, 2665031, 2644003, 2664045
CVE numbers	N/A

The ESXi and esx-update bulletins are dependent on each other. Always include both in a single ESXi host patch baseline or include the rollup bulletin in the baseline to avoid failure during host patching.

Updates the esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath, vsanhealth, vdfs, vsan, esx-base, crx, native-misc-drivers, esx-xserver, gc and cpu-microcode VIBs to resolve the following issues:

• PR 2656093: You might see loss of network connectivity as a result of a physical switch reboot

  The parameter for network teaming failback delay on ESXi hosts, Net.TeamPolicyUpDelay, is currently set at 10 minutes, but in certain environments, a physical switch might take more than 10 minutes to be ready to receive or transmit data after a reboot. As a result, you might see loss of network connectivity.

  This issue is resolved in this release. The fix increases the Net.TeamPolicyUpDelay parameter to up to 30 minutes. You can set the parameter by selecting the ESXi host and navigating to Configure > System -> Advanced System Settings > Net.TeamPolicyUpDelay. Alternatively, you can use the command esxcfg-advcfg -s <value> /Net/TeamPolicyUpDelay.

• PR 2652863: Changes in the Distributed Firewall (DFW) filter configuration might cause virtual machines to lose network connectivity

  Any DFW filter reconfiguration activity, such as adding or removing filters, might cause some filters to start dropping packets. As a result, virtual machines lose network connectivity and you need to reset the vmnic, change the port group, or reboot the virtual machine to restore traffic. In the output of the summarize-dvfilter command, you see state: IOChain Detaching for the failed filter.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2653874: A virtual machine might fail with a SIGSEGV error during 3D rendering

  A buffer over-read during some rendering operations might cause a 3D-enabled virtual machine to fail with a SIGSEGV error during interaction with graphics applications that use 3D acceleration.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2643508: If a virtual machine restarts or resets during a hot-plug operation, logs might cause available disk space to fill up and the machine to stop responding

  If a virtual machine restarts or resets during a hot-plug operation, logs in the vmware.log file of the virtual machine might fill up the available disk space and make the virtual machine unresponsive. The log messages are identical, such as: acpiNotifyQueue: Spurious ACPI event completion, data 0xFFFFFFFF.

  This issue is resolved in this release. If you cannot apply this patch, do not perform a reset or restart of the virtual machine before hot-plug operations or driver installations finish. If you already face the issue, power cycle the virtual machine.

• PR 2644189: smpboot fails for Linux virtual machines with enabled Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES)

  When a Linux virtual machine with multiple virtual CPUs and enabled SEV-ES boots, all CPUs except CPU0 are offline. You cannot bring the remaining CPUs online. The dmesg command returns an error such as smpboot: do_boot_cpu failed(-1) to wakeup CPU#1.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2652344: If you have .vswp swap files in a virtual machine directory, you see Device or resource busy error messages when scanning all files in the directory

  If you have .vswp swap files in a virtual machine directory, you see Device or resource busy error messages when scanning all files in the directory. You also see extra I/O flow on vSAN namespace objects and a slow down in the hostd service.
  The issue occurs if you attempt to open a file with .vswp extension as an object descriptor. The swap files of the VMX process and the virtual machine main memory have the same extension .vswp, but the swap files of the VMX process must not be opened as object descriptors.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2661064: The hostd service intermittently becomes unresponsive

  In rare cases, a race condition of multiple threads attempting to create a file and remove the directory at the same directory might cause a deadlock that fails the hostd service. The service restores only after a restart of the ESXi host. In the vmkernel logs, you see alerts such as:

  2020-03-31T05:20:00.509Z cpu12:4528223)ALERT: hostd detected to be non-responsive.

  Such a deadlock might affect other services as well, but the race condition window is small, and the issue is not frequent.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2667291: Virtual machines encryption takes long and ultimately fails with an error

  Virtual machines encryption might take several hours and ultimately fail with The file already exists error in the logs of the hostd service. The issue occurs if an orphaned or unused file <vm name="">.nvram exists in the VM configuration files. If the virtual machines have an entry such as NVRAM = “nvram” in the .vmx file, the encryption operation creates an encrypted file with the .nvram file extension, which the system considers a duplicate of the existing orphaned file.

  This issue is resolved in this release. If you already face the issue, manually delete the orphaned <vm name="">.nvram file before encryption.

• PR 2662512: vSAN host failure while disabling large client cache

  If vSAN attempts to disable a memory cache of 256 GB or more, the operation might cause ESXi host failure with a purple diagnostic screen.

  This issue is resolved in this release. 

• PR 2644221: If you enable LiveCoreDump as an option to collect system logs on an ESXi host, the host might become unresponsive

  If you enable LiveCoreDump as an option to collect system logs on an ESXi host, the host might become unresponsive. You see an error such as #PF Exception 14 in world 2125468 on a purple diagnostic screen.

  This issue is resolved in this release. 

• PR 2662606: You see health alarms for sensor entity ID 44 after upgrading the firmware of HPE Gen10 servers

  After upgrading the firmware version on HP Gen10 servers, you might see health alarms for the I/O Module 2 ALOM_Link_P2 and NIC_Link_02P2 sensors, related to the sensor entity ID 44.x. The alarms do not indicate an actual health issue and you can ignore them irrespective of the firmware version.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2661153: If you disable RC4, Active Directory user authentication on ESXi hosts might fail

  If you disable RC4 from your Active Directory configuration, user authentication to ESXi hosts might start to fail with Failed to authenticate user errors.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2655181: Virtual machines on NFS 4.1 datastore might become unresponsive after an NFS server failover or failback

  If a reclaim request repeats during an NFS server failover or failback operation, the open reclaim fails and causes virtual machines on NFS 4.1 datastores to become unresponsive.

  This issue is resolved in this release. The fix analyzes reclaim responses in detail and allows retries only when necessary.

• PR 2657411: The time that the processor is in system mode (%SYS) increases for certain disk I/O workloads in virtual machines

  When virtual machines resume from a snapshot, after migration operations by using vSphere vMotion, resuming a suspended virtual machine, or a hot-plug operation, you might see a small increase in the reported %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue occurs because the PVSCSI virtual storage adapter might stop dynamically sizing its internal queue to the guest workload. As a result, driver overhead increases during high I/O activity and might cause a minor increase in %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue does not affect the NVMe and LSI virtual devices.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2675442: Java applications on an AMD host in an Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) cluster might fail to start with an error that SSE2 is not supported

  Java applications on an AMD host in an EVC cluster might fail to start and report the error: Unknown x64 processor: SSE2 not supported. The issue occurs because the CPUID field family (leaf 1, EAX, bits 11-8) has an incorrect value. As a result, the Lookup Service and other Java-based services on the vCenter Server Appliance cannot start.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2657649: After upgrade of HPE servers to HPE Integrated Lights-Out 5 (iLO 5) firmware version 2.30, you see memory sensor health alerts

  After upgrading HPE servers, such as HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus, to iLO 5 firmware version 2.30, the vSphere Client displays health alerts for the memory sensors. The issue occurs because the hardware health monitoring system does not appropriately decode the Mem_Stat_* sensors when the first LUN is enabled after the upgrade.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2662558: If an SD card does not support Read Capacity 16, you see numerous errors in the logs

  On ESXi hosts that use a VID:PID/0bda:0329 Realtek Semiconductor Corp USB 3.0 SD card reader device that does not support Read Capacity 16, you might see numerous errors in the vmkernel logs, such as:
  2020-06-30T13:26:06.141Z cpu0:2097243)ScsiDeviceIO: 3449: Cmd(0x459ac1350600) 0x9e, CmdSN 0x2452e from world 0 to dev "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" failed H:0x7 D:0x0 P:0x0 Invalid sense data: 0x0 0x6e 0x73.
  and
  2020-06-30T14:23:18.280Z cpu0:2097243)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRequestFastDeviceProbe:237: NMP device "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" state in doubt; requested fast path state update...

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2661818: In case of a non-UTF8 string in the name property of numeric sensors, the vpxa service fails

  The vpxa service fails in case of a non-UTF8 string in the name property of numeric sensors, and ESXi hosts disconnect from the vCenter Server system.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2664084: The Managed Object Browser might display CPU and memory sensors status incorrectly

  Due to an error in processing sensor entries, memoryStatusInfo and cpuStatusInfo data might incorrectly include the status for non-CPU and non-memory sensors as well. This leads to incorrect status for the CPU and memory sensors in the Managed Object Browser.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2625155: ESXi installation might fail on media with unformatted or corrupt datastores

  ESXi installation might fail on media with datastores that cannot mount because a VMFS partition is either corrupt, unformatted, or has a different system ownership. The ESXi Installer might also remove VMFS partitions on attached USB boot media during upgrade or install.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2658647: Audit records configured to the scratch partition are lost when upgrading to ESXi 7.x from 6.7 Update 2 and later

  Audit records configured to the scratch partition on the boot device are not retained when upgrading to ESXi 7.x from 6.7 Update 2 and later. National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) certification requirements for ESXi post 6.7 Update 2 are that audit records located in /scratch persist after an upgrade.

  This issue is resolved in this release. For earlier ESXi 7.x releases, backup the audit records in /scratch to another filesystem or partition before upgrading. 

• PR 2659015: After a backup operation, identical error messages flood the hostd.log file

  After a backup operation, identical error messages, such as Block list: Cannot convert disk path <vmdk file> to real path, skipping., might flood the hostd.log file. This issue prevents other hostd service logs and might fill up the log memory.
  

  This issue is resolved in this release.​

• PR 2654686: The vSphere Virtual Volumes algorithm might not pick out the first Config-VVol that an ESXi host requests

  In a vSphere HA environment, the vSphere Virtual Volumes algorithm uses UUID to pick out when multiple ESXi hosts might compete to create and mount a Config-VVol with the same friendly name at the same time. However, the Config-VVol picked by UUID might not be the first one that the ESXi host requests and this might create issues in the vSphere Virtual Volumes datastores.

  This issue is resolved in this release. The vSphere Virtual Volumes algorithm uses a timestamp rather than a UUID to pick out when multiple ESXi hosts might compete to create and mount a Config-VVol with the same friendly name at the same time.

• PR 2664278: In the vSphere Client, you cannot change the log level configuration of the vpxa service after an upgrade of your vCenter Server system

  In the vSphere Client or by using API, you might not be able to change the log level configuration of the vpxa service on an ESX host due to a missing or invalid Vpx.Vpxa.config.log.level option after an upgrade of your vCenter Server system. 

  This issue is resolved in this release. The vpxa service automatically sets a valid value for the Vpx.Vpxa.config.log.level option and exposes it to the vSphere Client or an API call.

• PR 2676632: ESXi on USB or FCoE devices cannot find boot device paths

  If ESXi is installed on a slow boot device, such as USB or FCoE, ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device storage path. As a result, the bootbank partition and other partitions, such as /scratch, are not identified, and configuration changes are not saved. When ESXi boots, the /bootbank and /scratch symbolic links reference a temporary in-memory path.

  This issue is resolved in this release. However, the fix works for boot devices that ESXi detects in less than 2 minutes. On rare occasions, when boot device detection takes longer than 2 min, you must follow the steps in VMware knowledge base article 2149444 to manually set the boot option devListStabilityCount.

• PR 2647557: The VMware vSphere High Availability agent might become unresponsive due to a memory issue

  Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the Lifecycle Manager agent might not be able to contact an ESXi host to start a task, such as installation. As a result, the vSphere Client displays an error such as The vSphere HA agent is not reachable from vCenter Server. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2647557: vSphere Lifecycle Manager image compliance checks might fail with an unknown error

  During a cluster image management operation, the vSphere Lifecycle Manager might fail to contact the Lifecycle Manager agent on an ESXi host. In the vSphere Client, you see an error such as Unknown error occurred when invoking host API. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2628899: Enabling vSphere HA fails with a configuration error

  Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the vSphere HA agent might not be able to configure an ESXi host. As a result, in the vSphere Client you see an error such as:
  Cannot complete the configuration of the vSphere HA agent on the host. Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure. 
  The failure occurs because the process of the vSphere HA agent installation on the ESXi host might consume more memory than the allocated quota.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2663717: In the vSphere Client, you see hardware health warning with status Unknown

  In the vSphere Client, you see hardware health warning with status Unknown for some sensors on ESXi hosts.

  This issue is resolved in this release. Sensors that are not supported for decoding are ignored, and are not included in system health reports.

• PR 2633194: If you only open and close the Edit NTP Settings dialog box, the Start and stop with host option switches off

  If you only open and close the Edit NTP Settings dialog box, even without making any changes, the Start and stop with host option switches off. The NTP service does not start when an ESXi host powers on. In the vSphere Client, you see the NTP Service Startup Policy option Start and stop with host as selected. However, in the ESX Shell, when you run the command chkconfig –list, the NTP service is off.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2670891: Snapshot operations for virtual machines with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fail

  If you disable a software FCoE adapter as means to access Fibre Channel storage, the CBT module might fail to load and ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device. As a result, snapshot operations, such as creating and consolidating snapshots, fail.

  This issue is resolved in this release.

• PR 2665031: vSAN health service time out if there are issues with internet connectivity or DNS resolution

  In case of connectivity problems, vSAN health checks that require connectivity to VMware might time out. The vSphere Client displays an error message such as:
  Unable to query vSAN health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details.
  This issue can affect online health checks, HCL updates, and vSphere Lifecycle Manager baseline recommendations. If vCenter Server cannot resolve the problem, vSAN health checks might timeout while querying DNS entries.

  This issue is resolved in this release. 

• PR 2644003: vSAN host fails during disk removal

  While decommissioning a disk for removal, an ESXi host might fail with purple diagnostic screen. You see entries similar to the following in the backtrace:

  2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)@BlueScreen: Failed at bora/modules/vmkernel/lsomcommon/ssdlog/ssdopslog.c:398 -- NOT REACHED
2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)Code start: 0x418037400000 VMK uptime: 0:00:39:25.026
2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049b9e0:[0x41803750bb65]PanicvPanicInt@vmkernel#nover+0x439 stack: 0x44a00000001
2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049ba80:[0x41803750c0a2]Panic_vPanic@vmkernel#nover+0x23 stack: 0x121
2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049baa0:[0x4180375219c0]vmk_PanicWithModuleID@vmkernel#nover+0x41 stack: 0x451a8049bb00
2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb00:[0x41803874707a]SSDLOG_FreeLogEntry@LSOMCommon#1+0x32b stack: 0x800000
2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb70:[0x4180387ae4d1][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2e stack: 0x712d103
2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bbe0:[0x4180387dd08d][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x72 stack: 0x431b19603150
2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bcd0:[0x4180387dd2d3][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x80 stack: 0x4318102ba7a0
2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bd00:[0x4180387dabb5][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2ce stack: 0x800000
2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049beb0:[0x4180386de2db][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x590 stack: 0x43180fe83380
2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bf90:[0x4180375291ce]vmkWorldFunc@vmkernel#nover+0x4f stack: 0x4180375291ca
2020-09-01T04:22:47.116Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bfe0:[0x4180377107da]CpuSched_StartWorld@vmkernel#nover+0x77 stack: 0x0

  This issue is resolved in this release.

esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Critical
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the loadesx and esx-update VIBs.

VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Moderate
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the vmkata VIB.

HPE-nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Moderate
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	2655992
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the nhpsa VIB to resolve the following issue:

• Update to the nhpsa driver

  The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native driver for HPE Smart Array controllers, nhpsa, is updated to version 70.0051.0.100 to resolve several known issues.

VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Moderate
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the  vmkusb VIB.

Microchip-smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551

Patch Category	Bugfix
Patch Severity	Moderate
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	2661584
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the smartpqi VIB to resolve the following issue:

• Update to the smartpqi driver

  The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native SCSI driver for Microsemi Smart Family controllers, smartpqi, is updated to version 70.4000.0.100-5 to revert back several missing device IDs.

ESXi_7.0.1-0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Critical
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	2661006, 2671485, 2636149
CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

The ESXi and esx-update bulletins are dependent on each other. Always include both in a single ESXi host patch baseline or include the rollup bulletin in the baseline to avoid failure during host patching.

Updates the esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath, vsanhealth, vdfs, vsan, esx-base, crx, native-misc-drivers, esx-xserver, gc and cpu-microcode VIBs to resolve the following issues:

• ESXi 7.0 Update 1c addresses a denial of service vulnerability due to improper input validation in GuestInfo variables. A malicious actor with normal user privilege access to a virtual machine can cause failure in the virtual machine’s VMX process, leading to a denial of service condition. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2020-3999 to this issue. For more information, see VMSA-2020-0029.

• Update of the SQLite database

  The SQLite database is updated to version 3.33.0.

• Update to OpenSSL library

  The ESXi userworld OpenSSL library is updated to version openssl-1.0.2w.

• Update to the OpenSSH

  The OpenSSH version is updated to 8.3p1.

• Update to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon

  The NTP daemon is updated to version ntp-4.2.8p15.

• Update to the libcurl library

  The ESXi userworld libcurl library is updated to version 7.72.0.

• The following VMware Tools ISO images are bundled with ESXi 7.0 Update 1c:

  • windows.iso: VMware Tools 11.1.5 supports Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later.
  • linux.iso: VMware Tools 10.3.22 ISO image for Linux OS with glibc 2.5 or later.

  The following VMware Tools ISO images are available for download:

  • VMware Tools 10.0.12:
    • winPreVista.iso: for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003.
    • linuxPreGLibc25.iso: for Linux OS with a glibc version less than 2.5.
       
  • VMware Tools 11.0.6
    • windows.iso: for Windows Vista (SP2) and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
  • solaris.iso: VMware Tools image for Solaris.
  • darwin.iso: VMware Tools image for OSX.

  Follow the procedures listed in the following documents to download VMware Tools for platforms not bundled with ESXi:

  • VMware Tools 11.1.5 Release Notes
  • Earlier versions of VMware Tools
  • What Every vSphere Admin Must Know About VMware Tools
  • VMware Tools for hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy
  • Updating VMware Tools

esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Critical
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the loadesx and esx-update VIBs.

VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Important
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the vmkata VIB.

VMware-NVMeoF-RDMA_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Important
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_nvmerdma_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the nvmerdma VIB.

VMware-vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Important
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the  vmkfcoe VIB.

VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020

Patch Category	Security
Patch Severity	Important
Host Reboot Required	Yes
Virtual Machine Migration or Shutdown Required	Yes
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
VIBs Included	VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	N/A
CVE numbers	N/A

Updates the vmkusb VIB.

ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-standard

Profile Name	ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-standard
Build	For build information, see Patches Contained in this Release.
Vendor	VMware, Inc.
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Acceptance Level	PartnerSupported
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
Affected VIBs	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	2656093, 2652863, 2653874, 2643508, 2644189, 2652344, 2661064, 2667291, 2662512, 2644221, 2662606, 2661153, 2655181, 2657411, 2675442, 2657649, 2662558, 2661818, 2664084, 2625155, 2658647, 2659015, 2654686, 2664278, 2676632, 2647557, 2647557, 2628899, 2663717, 2633194, 2661808, 2670891, 2665031, 2644003, 2664045, 2655992, 2661584
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

• This patch updates the following issues:

  • The parameter for network teaming failback delay on ESXi hosts, Net.TeamPolicyUpDelay, is currently set at 10 minutes, but in certain environments, a physical switch might take more than 10 minutes to be ready to receive or transmit data after a reboot. As a result, you might see loss of network connectivity.

  • Any DFW filter reconfiguration activity, such as adding or removing filters, might cause some filters to start dropping packets. As a result, virtual machines lose network connectivity and you need to reset the vmnic, change the port group, or reboot the virtual machine to restore traffic. In the output of the summarize-dvfilter command, you see state: IOChain Detaching for the failed filter.

  • A buffer over-read during some rendering operations might cause a 3D-enabled virtual machine to fail with a SIGSEGV error during interaction with graphics applications that use 3D acceleration.

  • If a virtual machine restarts or resets during a hot-plug operation, logs in the vmware.log file of the virtual machine might fill up the available disk space and make the virtual machine unresponsive. The log messages are identical, such as: acpiNotifyQueue: Spurious ACPI event completion, data 0xFFFFFFFF.

  • When a Linux virtual machine with multiple virtual CPUs and enabled SEV-ES boots, all CPUs except CPU0 are offline. You cannot bring the remaining CPUs online. The dmesg command returns an error such as smpboot: do_boot_cpu failed(-1) to wakeup CPU#1.

  • If you have .vswp swap files in a virtual machine directory, you see Device or resource busy error messages when scanning all files in the directory. You also see extra I/O flow on vSAN namespace objects and a slow down in the hostd service.
    The issue occurs if you attempt to open a file with .vswp extension as an object descriptor. The swap files of the VMX process and the virtual machine main memory have the same extension .vswp, but the swap files of the VMX process must not be opened as object descriptors.

  • In rare cases, a race condition of multiple threads attempting to create a file and remove the directory at the same directory might cause a deadlock that fails the hostd service. The service restores only after a restart of the ESXi host. In the vmkernel logs, you see alerts such as:

    2020-03-31T05:20:00.509Z cpu12:4528223)ALERT: hostd detected to be non-responsive.

    Such a deadlock might affect other services as well, but the race condition window is small, and the issue is not frequent.

  • Virtual machines encryption might take several hours and ultimately fail with The file already exists error in the logs of the hostd service. The issue occurs if an orphaned or unused file <vm name="">.nvram exists in the VM configuration files. If the virtual machines have an entry such as NVRAM = “nvram” in the .vmx file, the encryption operation creates an encrypted file with the .nvram file extension, which the system considers a duplicate of the existing orphaned file.

  • If vSAN attempts to disable a memory cache of 256 GB or more, the operation might cause ESXi host failure with a purple diagnostic screen.

  • If you enable LiveCoreDump as an option to collect system logs on an ESXi host, the host might become unresponsive. You see an error such as #PF Exception 14 in world 2125468 on a purple diagnostic screen.

  • After upgrading the firmware version on HP Gen10 servers, you might see health alarms for the I/O Module 2 ALOM_Link_P2 and NIC_Link_02P2 sensors, related to the sensor entity ID 44.x. The alarms do not indicate an actual health issue and you can ignore them irrespective of the firmware version.

  • If you disable RC4 from your Active Directory configuration, user authentication to ESXi hosts might start to fail with Failed to authenticate user errors.

  • If a reclaim request repeats during an NFS server failover or failback operation, the open reclaim fails and causes virtual machines on NFS 4.1 datastores to become unresponsive.

  • When virtual machines resume from a snapshot, after migration operations by using vSphere vMotion, resuming a suspended virtual machine, or a hot-plug operation, you might see a small increase in the reported %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue occurs because the PVSCSI virtual storage adapter might stop dynamically sizing its internal queue to the guest workload. As a result, driver overhead increases during high I/O activity and might cause a minor increase in %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue does not affect the NVMe and LSI virtual devices.

  • Java applications on an AMD host in an EVC cluster might fail to start and report the error: Unknown x64 processor: SSE2 not supported. The issue occurs because the CPUID field family (leaf 1, EAX, bits 11-8) has an incorrect value. As a result, the Lookup Service and other Java-based services on the vCenter Server Appliance cannot start.

  • After upgrading HPE servers, such as HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus, to iLO 5 firmware version 2.30, the vSphere Client displays health alerts for the memory sensors. The issue occurs because the hardware health monitoring system does not appropriately decode the Mem_Stat_* sensors when the first LUN is enabled after the upgrade.

  • On ESXi hosts that use a VID:PID/0bda:0329 Realtek Semiconductor Corp USB 3.0 SD card reader device that does not support Read Capacity 16, you might see numerous errors in the vmkernel logs, such as:
    2020-06-30T13:26:06.141Z cpu0:2097243)ScsiDeviceIO: 3449: Cmd(0x459ac1350600) 0x9e, CmdSN 0x2452e from world 0 to dev "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" failed H:0x7 D:0x0 P:0x0 Invalid sense data: 0x0 0x6e 0x73.
    and
    2020-06-30T14:23:18.280Z cpu0:2097243)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRequestFastDeviceProbe:237: NMP device "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" state in doubt; requested fast path state update...

  • The vpxa service fails in case of a non-UTF8 string in the name property of numeric sensors, and ESXi hosts disconnect from the vCenter Server system.

  • Due to an error in processing sensor entries, memoryStatusInfo and cpuStatusInfo data might incorrectly include the status for non-CPU and non-memory sensors as well. This leads to incorrect status for the CPU and memory sensors in the Managed Object Browser.

  • ESXi installation might fail on media with datastores that cannot mount because a VMFS partition is either corrupt, unformatted, or has a different system ownership. The ESXi Installer might also remove VMFS partitions on attached USB boot media during upgrade or install.

  • Audit records configured to the scratch partition on the boot device are not retained when upgrading to ESXi 7.x from 6.7 Update 2 and later. National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) certification requirements for ESXi post 6.7 Update 2 are that audit records located in /scratch persist after an upgrade.

  • After a backup operation, identical error messages, such as Block list: Cannot convert disk path <vmdk file> to real path, skipping., might flood the hostd.log file. This issue prevents other hostd service logs and might fill up the log memory.

  • In a vSphere HA environment, the vSphere Virtual Volumes algorithm uses UUID to pick out when multiple ESXi hosts might compete to create and mount a Config-VVol with the same friendly name at the same time. However, the Config-VVol picked by UUID might not be the first one that the ESXi host requests and this might create issues in the vSphere Virtual Volumes datastores.

  • In the vSphere Client or by using API, you might not be able to change the log level configuration of the vpxa service on an ESX host due to a missing or invalid Vpx.Vpxa.config.log.level option after an upgrade of your vCenter Server system. 

  • If ESXi is installed on a slow boot device, such as USB or FCoE, ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device storage path. As a result, the bootbank partition and other partitions, such as /scratch, are not identified, and configuration changes are not saved. When ESXi boots, the /bootbank and /scratch symbolic links reference a temporary in-memory path.

  • Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the Lifecycle Manager agent might not be able to contact an ESXi host to start a task, such as installation. As a result, the vSphere Client displays an error such as The vSphere HA agent is not reachable from vCenter Server. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  • During a cluster image management operation, the vSphere Lifecycle Manager might fail to contact the Lifecycle Manager agent on an ESXi host. In the vSphere Client, you see an error such as Unknown error occurred when invoking host API. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  • Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the vSphere HA agent might not be able to configure an ESXi host. As a result, in the vSphere Client you see an error such as:
    Cannot complete the configuration of the vSphere HA agent on the host. Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure. 
    The failure occurs because the process of the vSphere HA agent installation on the ESXi host might consume more memory than the allocated quota.

  • In the vSphere Client, you see hardware health warning with status Unknown for some sensors on ESXi hosts.

  • If you only open and close the Edit NTP Settings dialog box, even without making any changes, the Start and stop with host option switches off. The NTP service does not start when an ESXi host powers on. In the vSphere Client, you see the NTP Service Startup Policy option Start and stop with host as selected. However, in the ESX Shell, when you run the command chkconfig –list, the NTP service is off.

  • If you disable a software FCoE adapter as means to access Fibre Channel storage, the CBT module might fail to load and ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device. As a result, snapshot operations, such as creating and consolidating snapshots, fail.

  • In case of connectivity problems, vSAN health checks that require connectivity to VMware might time out. The vSphere Client displays an error message such as:
    Unable to query vSAN health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details.
    This issue can affect online health checks, HCL updates, and vSphere Lifecycle Manager baseline recommendations. If vCenter Server cannot resolve the problem, vSAN health checks might timeout while querying DNS entries.

  • While decommissioning a disk for removal, an ESXi host might fail with purple diagnostic screen. You see entries similar to the following in the backtrace:

    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)@BlueScreen: Failed at bora/modules/vmkernel/lsomcommon/ssdlog/ssdopslog.c:398 -- NOT REACHED
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)Code start: 0x418037400000 VMK uptime: 0:00:39:25.026
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049b9e0:[0x41803750bb65]PanicvPanicInt@vmkernel#nover+0x439 stack: 0x44a00000001
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049ba80:[0x41803750c0a2]Panic_vPanic@vmkernel#nover+0x23 stack: 0x121
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049baa0:[0x4180375219c0]vmk_PanicWithModuleID@vmkernel#nover+0x41 stack: 0x451a8049bb00
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb00:[0x41803874707a]SSDLOG_FreeLogEntry@LSOMCommon#1+0x32b stack: 0x800000
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb70:[0x4180387ae4d1][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2e stack: 0x712d103
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bbe0:[0x4180387dd08d][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x72 stack: 0x431b19603150
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bcd0:[0x4180387dd2d3][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x80 stack: 0x4318102ba7a0
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bd00:[0x4180387dabb5][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2ce stack: 0x800000
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049beb0:[0x4180386de2db][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x590 stack: 0x43180fe83380
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bf90:[0x4180375291ce]vmkWorldFunc@vmkernel#nover+0x4f stack: 0x4180375291ca
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.116Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bfe0:[0x4180377107da]CpuSched_StartWorld@vmkernel#nover+0x77 stack: 0x0

  • If a NVME device has multiple namespaces configured, support for vSAN secure disk wipe operations can change dynamically, based on the number of namespaces. If a new namespace is configured while a secure wipe operation is in progress, for example in VxRail or  the Google Cloud Platform, the data on the newly added namespace might be erased.

  • The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native driver for HPE Smart Array controllers, nhpsa, is updated to version 70.0051.0.100 to resolve several known issues.

  • The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native SCSI driver for Microsemi Smart Family controllers, smartpqi, is updated to version 70.4000.0.100-5 to revert back several missing device IDs.

ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-no-tools

Profile Name	ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-no-tools
Build	For build information, see Patches Contained in this Release.
Vendor	VMware, Inc.
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Acceptance Level	PartnerSupported
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
Affected VIBs	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_nhpsa_70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.25.17325551 VMW_bootbank_smartpqi_70.4000.0.100-4vmw.701.0.25.17325551
PRs Fixed	2656093, 2652863, 2653874, 2643508, 2644189, 2652344, 2661064, 2667291, 2662512, 2644221, 2662606, 2661153, 2655181, 2657411, 2675442, 2657649, 2662558, 2661818, 2664084, 2625155, 2658647, 2659015, 2654686, 2664278, 2676632, 2647557, 2647557, 2628899, 2663717, 2633194, 2661808, 2670891, 2665031, 2644003, 2664045, 2655992, 2661584
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

• This patch updates the following issues:

  • The parameter for network teaming failback delay on ESXi hosts, Net.TeamPolicyUpDelay, is currently set at 10 minutes, but in certain environments, a physical switch might take more than 10 minutes to be ready to receive or transmit data after a reboot. As a result, you might see loss of network connectivity.

  • Any DFW filter reconfiguration activity, such as adding or removing filters, might cause some filters to start dropping packets. As a result, virtual machines lose network connectivity and you need to reset the vmnic, change the port group, or reboot the virtual machine to restore traffic. In the output of the summarize-dvfilter command, you see state: IOChain Detaching for the failed filter.

  • A buffer over-read during some rendering operations might cause a 3D-enabled virtual machine to fail with a SIGSEGV error during interaction with graphics applications that use 3D acceleration.

  • If a virtual machine restarts or resets during a hot-plug operation, logs in the vmware.log file of the virtual machine might fill up the available disk space and make the virtual machine unresponsive. The log messages are identical, such as: acpiNotifyQueue: Spurious ACPI event completion, data 0xFFFFFFFF.

  • When a Linux virtual machine with multiple virtual CPUs and enabled SEV-ES boots, all CPUs except CPU0 are offline. You cannot bring the remaining CPUs online. The dmesg command returns an error such as smpboot: do_boot_cpu failed(-1) to wakeup CPU#1.

  • If you have .vswp swap files in a virtual machine directory, you see Device or resource busy error messages when scanning all files in the directory. You also see extra I/O flow on vSAN namespace objects and a slow down in the hostd service.
    The issue occurs if you attempt to open a file with .vswp extension as an object descriptor. The swap files of the VMX process and the virtual machine main memory have the same extension .vswp, but the swap files of the VMX process must not be opened as object descriptors.

  • In rare cases, a race condition of multiple threads attempting to create a file and remove the directory at the same directory might cause a deadlock that fails the hostd service. The service restores only after a restart of the ESXi host. In the vmkernel logs, you see alerts such as:

    2020-03-31T05:20:00.509Z cpu12:4528223)ALERT: hostd detected to be non-responsive.

    Such a deadlock might affect other services as well, but the race condition window is small, and the issue is not frequent.

  • Virtual machines encryption might take several hours and ultimately fail with The file already exists error in the logs of the hostd service. The issue occurs if an orphaned or unused file <vm name="">.nvram exists in the VM configuration files. If the virtual machines have an entry such as NVRAM = “nvram” in the .vmx file, the encryption operation creates an encrypted file with the .nvram file extension, which the system considers a duplicate of the existing orphaned file.

  • If vSAN attempts to disable a memory cache of 256 GB or more, the operation might cause ESXi host failure with a purple diagnostic screen.

  • If you enable LiveCoreDump as an option to collect system logs on an ESXi host, the host might become unresponsive. You see an error such as #PF Exception 14 in world 2125468 on a purple diagnostic screen.

  • After upgrading the firmware version on HP Gen10 servers, you might see health alarms for the I/O Module 2 ALOM_Link_P2 and NIC_Link_02P2 sensors, related to the sensor entity ID 44.x. The alarms do not indicate an actual health issue and you can ignore them irrespective of the firmware version.

  • If you disable RC4 from your Active Directory configuration, user authentication to ESXi hosts might start to fail with Failed to authenticate user errors.

  • If a reclaim request repeats during an NFS server failover or failback operation, the open reclaim fails and causes virtual machines on NFS 4.1 datastores to become unresponsive.

  • When virtual machines resume from a snapshot, after migration operations by using vSphere vMotion, resuming a suspended virtual machine, or a hot-plug operation, you might see a small increase in the reported %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue occurs because the PVSCSI virtual storage adapter might stop dynamically sizing its internal queue to the guest workload. As a result, driver overhead increases during high I/O activity and might cause a minor increase in %SYS time for certain disk I/O workloads. The issue does not affect the NVMe and LSI virtual devices.

  • Java applications on an AMD host in an EVC cluster might fail to start and report the error: Unknown x64 processor: SSE2 not supported. The issue occurs because the CPUID field family (leaf 1, EAX, bits 11-8) has an incorrect value. As a result, the Lookup Service and other Java-based services on the vCenter Server Appliance cannot start.

  • After upgrading HPE servers, such as HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus, to iLO 5 firmware version 2.30, the vSphere Client displays health alerts for the memory sensors. The issue occurs because the hardware health monitoring system does not appropriately decode the Mem_Stat_* sensors when the first LUN is enabled after the upgrade.

  • On ESXi hosts that use a VID:PID/0bda:0329 Realtek Semiconductor Corp USB 3.0 SD card reader device that does not support Read Capacity 16, you might see numerous errors in the vmkernel logs, such as:
    2020-06-30T13:26:06.141Z cpu0:2097243)ScsiDeviceIO: 3449: Cmd(0x459ac1350600) 0x9e, CmdSN 0x2452e from world 0 to dev "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" failed H:0x7 D:0x0 P:0x0 Invalid sense data: 0x0 0x6e 0x73.
    and
    2020-06-30T14:23:18.280Z cpu0:2097243)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRequestFastDeviceProbe:237: NMP device "mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" state in doubt; requested fast path state update...

  • The vpxa service fails in case of a non-UTF8 string in the name property of numeric sensors, and ESXi hosts disconnect from the vCenter Server system.

  • Due to an error in processing sensor entries, memoryStatusInfo and cpuStatusInfo data might incorrectly include the status for non-CPU and non-memory sensors as well. This leads to incorrect status for the CPU and memory sensors in the Managed Object Browser.

  • ESXi installation might fail on media with datastores that cannot mount because a VMFS partition is either corrupt, unformatted, or has a different system ownership. The ESXi Installer might also remove VMFS partitions on attached USB boot media during upgrade or install.

  • Audit records configured to the scratch partition on the boot device are not retained when upgrading to ESXi 7.x from 6.7 Update 2 and later. National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) certification requirements for ESXi post 6.7 Update 2 are that audit records located in /scratch persist after an upgrade.

  • After a backup operation, identical error messages, such as Block list: Cannot convert disk path <vmdk file> to real path, skipping., might flood the hostd.log file. This issue prevents other hostd service logs and might fill up the log memory.

  • In a vSphere HA environment, the vSphere Virtual Volumes algorithm uses UUID to pick out when multiple ESXi hosts might compete to create and mount a Config-VVol with the same friendly name at the same time. However, the Config-VVol picked by UUID might not be the first one that the ESXi host requests and this might create issues in the vSphere Virtual Volumes datastores.

  • In the vSphere Client or by using API, you might not be able to change the log level configuration of the vpxa service on an ESX host due to a missing or invalid Vpx.Vpxa.config.log.level option after an upgrade of your vCenter Server system. 

  • If ESXi is installed on a slow boot device, such as USB or FCoE, ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device storage path. As a result, the bootbank partition and other partitions, such as /scratch, are not identified, and configuration changes are not saved. When ESXi boots, the /bootbank and /scratch symbolic links reference a temporary in-memory path.

  • Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the Lifecycle Manager agent might not be able to contact an ESXi host to start a task, such as installation. As a result, the vSphere Client displays an error such as The vSphere HA agent is not reachable from vCenter Server. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  • During a cluster image management operation, the vSphere Lifecycle Manager might fail to contact the Lifecycle Manager agent on an ESXi host. In the vSphere Client, you see an error such as Unknown error occurred when invoking host API. The failure occurs when the vSphere Lifecycle Manager task status database on the ESXi host is not frequently cleaned up and the Lifecycle Manager agent does not have enough memory allocated to handle the size of the database file.

  • Under vSphere Lifecycle Manager cluster image management, the vSphere HA agent might not be able to configure an ESXi host. As a result, in the vSphere Client you see an error such as:
    Cannot complete the configuration of the vSphere HA agent on the host. Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure. 
    The failure occurs because the process of the vSphere HA agent installation on the ESXi host might consume more memory than the allocated quota.

  • In the vSphere Client, you see hardware health warning with status Unknown for some sensors on ESXi hosts.

  • If you only open and close the Edit NTP Settings dialog box, even without making any changes, the Start and stop with host option switches off. The NTP service does not start when an ESXi host powers on. In the vSphere Client, you see the NTP Service Startup Policy option Start and stop with host as selected. However, in the ESX Shell, when you run the command chkconfig –list, the NTP service is off.

  • If you disable a software FCoE adapter as means to access Fibre Channel storage, the CBT module might fail to load and ESXi might not be able to detect a boot device. As a result, snapshot operations, such as creating and consolidating snapshots, fail.

  • In case of connectivity problems, vSAN health checks that require connectivity to VMware might time out. The vSphere Client displays an error message such as:
    Unable to query vSAN health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details.
    This issue can affect online health checks, HCL updates, and vSphere Lifecycle Manager baseline recommendations. If vCenter Server cannot resolve the problem, vSAN health checks might timeout while querying DNS entries.

  • While decommissioning a disk for removal, an ESXi host might fail with purple diagnostic screen. You see entries similar to the following in the backtrace:

    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)@BlueScreen: Failed at bora/modules/vmkernel/lsomcommon/ssdlog/ssdopslog.c:398 -- NOT REACHED
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)Code start: 0x418037400000 VMK uptime: 0:00:39:25.026
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049b9e0:[0x41803750bb65]PanicvPanicInt@vmkernel#nover+0x439 stack: 0x44a00000001
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.112Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049ba80:[0x41803750c0a2]Panic_vPanic@vmkernel#nover+0x23 stack: 0x121
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049baa0:[0x4180375219c0]vmk_PanicWithModuleID@vmkernel#nover+0x41 stack: 0x451a8049bb00
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb00:[0x41803874707a]SSDLOG_FreeLogEntry@LSOMCommon#1+0x32b stack: 0x800000
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.113Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bb70:[0x4180387ae4d1][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2e stack: 0x712d103
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bbe0:[0x4180387dd08d][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x72 stack: 0x431b19603150
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.114Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bcd0:[0x4180387dd2d3][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x80 stack: 0x4318102ba7a0
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bd00:[0x4180387dabb5][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x2ce stack: 0x800000
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049beb0:[0x4180386de2db][email protected]#0.0.0.1+0x590 stack: 0x43180fe83380
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.115Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bf90:[0x4180375291ce]vmkWorldFunc@vmkernel#nover+0x4f stack: 0x4180375291ca
    2020-09-01T04:22:47.116Z cpu7:2099790)0x451a8049bfe0:[0x4180377107da]CpuSched_StartWorld@vmkernel#nover+0x77 stack: 0x0

  • If a NVME device has multiple namespaces configured, support for vSAN secure disk wipe operations can change dynamically, based on the number of namespaces. If a new namespace is configured while a secure wipe operation is in progress, for example in VxRail or  the Google Cloud Platform, the data on the newly added namespace might be erased.

  • The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native driver for HPE Smart Array controllers, nhpsa, is updated to version 70.0051.0.100 to resolve several known issues.

  • The disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native SCSI driver for Microsemi Smart Family controllers, smartpqi, is updated to version 70.4000.0.100-5 to revert back several missing device IDs.

ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-standard

Profile Name	ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-standard
Build	For build information, see Patches Contained in this Release.
Vendor	VMware, Inc.
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Acceptance Level	PartnerSupported
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
Affected VIBs	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_nvmerdma_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	2661006, 2671485, 2636149
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

• This patch updates the following issues:

  • ESXi 7.0 Update 1c addresses a denial of service vulnerability due to improper input validation in GuestInfo variables. A malicious actor with normal user privilege access to a virtual machine can cause failure in the virtual machine’s VMX process, leading to a denial of service condition. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2020-3999 to this issue. For more information, see VMSA-2020-0029.

  • The SQLite database is updated to version 3.33.0.

  • The ESXi userworld OpenSSL library is updated to version openssl-1.0.2w.

  • The OpenSSH version is updated to 8.3p1.

  • The NTP daemon is updated to version ntp-4.2.8p15.

  • The ESXi userworld libcurl library is updated to version 7.72.0.

  • The following VMware Tools ISO images are bundled with ESXi 7.0 Update 1c:

    • windows.iso: VMware Tools 11.1.5 supports Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later.
    • linux.iso: VMware Tools 10.3.22 ISO image for Linux OS with glibc 2.5 or later.

    The following VMware Tools ISO images are available for download:

    • VMware Tools 10.0.12:
      • winPreVista.iso: for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003.
      • linuxPreGLibc25.iso: for Linux OS with a glibc version less than 2.5.
         
    • VMware Tools 11.0.6
      • windows.iso: for Windows Vista (SP2) and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
    • solaris.iso: VMware Tools image for Solaris.
    • darwin.iso: VMware Tools image for OSX.

    Follow the procedures listed in the following documents to download VMware Tools for platforms not bundled with ESXi:

    • VMware Tools 11.1.5 Release Notes
    • Earlier versions of VMware Tools
    • What Every vSphere Admin Must Know About VMware Tools
    • VMware Tools for hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy
    • Updating VMware Tools

ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-no-tools

Profile Name	ESXi-7.0U1sc-17325020-no-tools
Build	For build information, see Patches Contained in this Release.
Vendor	VMware, Inc.
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Acceptance Level	PartnerSupported
Affected Hardware	N/A
Affected Software	N/A
Affected VIBs	VMware_bootbank_crx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-xserver_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-base_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-generic-fastpath_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_native-misc-drivers_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsan_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vsanhealth_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_gc_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_cpu-microcode_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_vdfs_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_esx-update_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMware_bootbank_loadesx_7.0.1-0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_nvmerdma_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020 VMW_bootbank_vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.20.17325020
PRs Fixed	2661006, 2671485, 2636149
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

• This patch updates the following issues:

  • ESXi 7.0 Update 1c addresses a denial of service vulnerability due to improper input validation in GuestInfo variables. A malicious actor with normal user privilege access to a virtual machine can cause failure in the virtual machine’s VMX process, leading to a denial of service condition. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2020-3999 to this issue. For more information, see VMSA-2020-0029.

  • The SQLite database is updated to version 3.33.0.

  • The ESXi userworld OpenSSL library is updated to version openssl-1.0.2w.

  • The OpenSSH version is updated to 8.3p1.

  • The NTP daemon is updated to version ntp-4.2.8p15.

  • The ESXi userworld libcurl library is updated to version 7.72.0.

  • The following VMware Tools ISO images are bundled with ESXi 7.0 Update 1c:

    • windows.iso: VMware Tools 11.1.5 supports Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later.
    • linux.iso: VMware Tools 10.3.22 ISO image for Linux OS with glibc 2.5 or later.

    The following VMware Tools ISO images are available for download:

    • VMware Tools 10.0.12:
      • winPreVista.iso: for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003.
      • linuxPreGLibc25.iso: for Linux OS with a glibc version less than 2.5.
         
    • VMware Tools 11.0.6
      • windows.iso: for Windows Vista (SP2) and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
    • solaris.iso: VMware Tools image for Solaris.
    • darwin.iso: VMware Tools image for OSX.

    Follow the procedures listed in the following documents to download VMware Tools for platforms not bundled with ESXi:

    • VMware Tools 11.1.5 Release Notes
    • Earlier versions of VMware Tools
    • What Every vSphere Admin Must Know About VMware Tools
    • VMware Tools for hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy
    • Updating VMware Tools

ESXi Image - ESXi70U1c-17325551

Name	ESXi
Version	7.0 U1c-17325551
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Category	Enhancement
Affected Components​	ESXi ESXi Install/Upgrade Component VMWare ATA Storage Controller Driver HPE Smart Array Controller Driver VMWare USB Driver Microsemi Storage Solution Smart Array Storage Controller Driver
PRs Fixed	2656093, 2652863, 2653874, 2643508, 2644189, 2652344, 2661064, 2667291, 2662512, 2644221, 2662606, 2661153, 2655181, 2657411, 2675442, 2657649, 2662558, 2661818, 2664084, 2625155, 2658647, 2659015, 2654686, 2664278, 2676632, 2647557, 2647557, 2628899, 2663717, 2633194, 2661808, 2670891, 2665031, 2644003, 2664045, 2655992, 2661584
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

ESXi Image - ESXi7.0U1sc-17325020

Name	ESXi
Version	7.0 U1sc-17325020
Release Date	December 17, 2020
Category	Enhancement
Affected Components​	ESXi ESXi Install/Upgrade Component VMWare ATA Storage Controller Driver VMware NVMe over Fabric - RDMA Driver VMware native Software FCoE Driver VMWare USB Driver
PRs Fixed	2661006, 2671485, 2636149
Related CVE numbers	CVE-2020-3999

Known Issues

The known issues are grouped as follows.

• Upgrade Issues
• Miscellaneous Issues
• Known Issues from Earlier Releases

Upgrade Issues

• Upgrades to ESXi 7.x from 6.5x and 6.7.0 by using ESXCLI might fail due to a space limitation

  Upgrades to ESXi 7.x from 6.5.x and 6.7.0 by using the esxcli software profile update or esxcli software profile install ESXCLI commands might fail, because the ESXi bootbank might be less than the size of the image profile. In the ESXi Shell or the PowerCLI shell, you see an error such as:
   [InstallationError]  
The pending transaction requires 244 MB free space, however the maximum supported size is 239 MB.  
Please refer to the log file for more details.
  The issue also occurs when you attempt an ESXi host upgrade by using the ESXCLI commands esxcli software vib update or esxcli software vib install.

  Workaround: You can perform the upgrade in two steps, by using the esxcli software profile update command to update ESXi hosts to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 or later, and then update to 7.0 Update 1c. Alternatively, you can run an upgrade by using an ISO image and the vSphere Lifecycle Manager.

Miscellaneous Issues

• vSAN secure disk wipe not supported on NVMe devices with multiple namespaces

  If a NVME device has multiple namespaces configured, vSAN secure disk wipe operations are not supported.
  If a new namespace is configured while a secure wipe operation is in progress, for example in VMware Tanzu Architecture for Dell EMC VxRail or the Google Cloud Platform, the data on the newly added namespace might be erased, so vSAN secure disk wipe operations are supported only for NVME devices with a single namespace.

  Workaround: None

Known Issues from Earlier Releases

To view a list of previous known issues, click here.

The earlier known issues are grouped as follows.

• Installation, Upgrade, and Migration Issues
• Security Features Issues
• Networking Issues
• Storage Issues
• vCenter Server and vSphere Client Issues
• Virtual Machine Management Issues
• vSphere HA and Fault Tolerance Issues
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager Issues
• Miscellaneous Issues

Installation, Upgrade, and Migration Issues

• The vCenter Upgrade/Migration pre-checks fail with "Unexpected error 87"

  The vCenter Server Upgrade/Migration pre-checks fail when the Security Token Service (STS) certificate does not contain a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field. This situation occurs when you have replaced the vCenter 5.5 Single Sign-On certificate with a custom certificate that has no SAN field, and you attempt to upgrade to vCenter Server 7.0. The upgrade considers the STS certificate invalid and the pre-checks prevent the upgrade process from continuing.

  Workaround: Replace the STS certificate with a valid certificate that contains a SAN field then proceed with the vCenter Server 7.0 Upgrade/Migration.

• Problems upgrading to vSphere 7.0 with pre-existing CIM providers

  After upgrade, previously installed 32-bit CIM providers stop working because ESXi requires 64-bit CIM providers. Customers may lose management API functions related to CIMPDK, NDDK (native DDK), HEXDK, VAIODK (IO filters), and see errors related to uwglibc dependency.
  The syslog reports module missing, "32 bit shared libraries not loaded."

  Workaround: There is no workaround. The fix is to download new 64-bit CIM providers from your vendor.

• Installation of 7.0 Update 1 drivers on ESXi 7.0 hosts might fail

  You cannot install drivers applicable to ESXi 7.0 Update 1 on hosts that run ESXi 7.0 or 7.0b.
  The operation fails with an error, such as:
  VMW_bootbank_qedrntv_3.40.4.0-12vmw.701.0.0.xxxxxxx requires vmkapi_2_7_0_0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile. ​
Please refer to the log file for more details.

  Workaround: Update the ESXi host to 7.0 Update 1. Retry the driver installation.

• Smart Card and RSA SecurID authentication might stop working after upgrading to vCenter Server 7.0

  If you have configured vCenter Server for either Smart Card or RSA SecurID authentication, see the VMware knowledge base article at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78057 before starting the vSphere 7.0 upgrade process. If you do not perform the workaround as described in the KB, you might see the following error messages and Smart Card or RSA SecurID authentication does not work.

  "Smart card authentication may stop working. Smart card settings may not be preserved, and smart card authentication may stop working."

  or

  "RSA SecurID authentication may stop working. RSA SecurID settings may not be preserved, and RSA SecurID authentication may stop working."

  Workaround: Before upgrading to vSphere 7.0, see the VMware knowledge base article at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78057.

• Upgrading a vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller from 6.7u3 to 7.0 fails with VMAFD error

  When you upgrade a vCenter Server deployment using an external Platform Services Controller, you converge the Platform Services Controller into a vCenter Server appliance. If the upgrade fails with the error install.vmafd.vmdir_vdcpromo_error_21, the VMAFD firstboot process has failed. The VMAFD firstboot process copies the VMware Directory Service Database (data.mdb) from the source Platform Services Controller and replication partner vCenter Server appliance.

  Workaround: Disable TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and Generic Segmentation Offload (GSO) on the Ethernet adapter of the source Platform Services Controller or replication partner vCenter Server appliance before upgrading a vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller. See Knowledge Base article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/74678

• Upgrading vCenter Server using the CLI incorrectly preserves the Transport Security Layer (TLS) configuration for the vSphere Authentication Proxy service

  If the vSphere Authentication Proxy service (vmcam) is configured to use a particular TLS protocol other than the default TLS 1.2 protocol, this configuration is preserved during the CLI upgrade process. By default, vSphere supports the TLS 1.2 encryption protocol. If you must use the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 protocols to support products or services that do not support TLS 1.2, use the TLS Configurator Utility to enable or disable different TLS protocol versions.

  Workaround: Use the TLS Configurator Utility to configure the vmcam port. To learn how to manage TLS protocol configuration and use the TLS Configurator Utility, see the VMware Security documentation.

• Smart card and RSA SecurID settings may not be preserved during vCenter Server upgrade

  Authentication using RSA SecurID will not work after upgrading to vCenter Server 7.0. An error message will alert you to this issue when attempting to login using your RSA SecurID login.

  Workaround: Reconfigure the smart card or RSA SecureID.

• Migration of vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server appliance 7.0 fails with network error message

  Migration of vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server appliance 7.0 fails with the error message IP already exists in the network. This prevents the migration process from configuring the network parameters on the new vCenter Server appliance. For more information, examine the log file: /var/log/vmware/upgrade/UpgradeRunner.log

  Workaround:

  1. Verify that all Windows Updates have been completed on the source vCenter Server for Windows instance, or disable automatic Windows Updates until after the migration finishes.
  2. Retry the migration of vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server appliance 7.0.

   

• When you configure the number of virtual functions for an SR-IOV device by using the max_vfs module parameter, the changes might not take effect

  In vSphere 7.0, you can configure the number of virtual functions for an SR-IOV device by using the Virtual Infrastructure Management (VIM) API, for example, through the vSphere Client. The task does not require reboot of the ESXi host. After you use the VIM API configuration, if you try to configure the number of SR-IOV virtual functions by using the max_vfs module parameter, the changes might not take effect because they are overridden by the VIM API configuration.

  Workaround: None. To configure the number of virtual functions for an SR-IOV device, use the same method every time. Use the VIM API or use the max_vfs module parameter and reboot the ESXi host.

• Upgraded vCenter Server appliance instance does not retain all the secondary networks (NICs) from the source instance

  During a major upgrade, if the source instance of the vCenter Server appliance is configured with multiple secondary networks other than the VCHA NIC, the target vCenter Server instance will not retain secondary networks other than the VCHA NIC. If the source instance is configured with multiple NICs that are part of DVS port groups, the NIC configuration will not be preserved during the upgrade. Configurations for vCenter Server appliance instances that are part of the standard port group will be preserved.

  Workaround: None. Manually configure the secondary network in the target vCenter Server appliance instance.

• After upgrading or migrating a vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller, users authenticating using Active Directory lose access to the newly upgraded vCenter Server instance

  After upgrading or migrating a vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller, if the newly upgraded vCenter Server is not joined to an Active Directory domain, users authenticating using Active Directory will lose access to the vCenter Server instance.

  Workaround: Verify that the new vCenter Server instance has been joined to an Active Directory domain. See Knowledge Base article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2118543

• Migrating a vCenter Server for Windows with an external Platform Services Controller using an Oracle database fails

  If there are non-ASCII strings in the Oracle events and tasks table the migration can fail when exporting events and tasks data. The following error message is provided: UnicodeDecodeError

  Workaround: None.

• After an ESXi host upgrade, a Host Profile compliance check shows non-compliant status while host remediation tasks fail

  The non-compliant status indicates an inconsistency between the profile and the host.

  This inconsistency might occur because ESXi 7.0 does not allow duplicate claim rules, but the profile you use contains duplicate rules. For example, if you attempt to use the Host Profile that you extracted from the host before upgrading ESXi 6.5 or ESXi 6.7 to version 7.0 and the Host Profile contains any duplicate claim rules of system default rules, you might experience the problems.

  Workaround:

  1. Remove any duplicate claim rules of the system default rules from the Host Profile document.
  2. Check the compliance status.
  3. Remediate the host.
  4. If the previous steps do not help, reboot the host.

   

• Error message displays in the vCenter Server Management Interface

  After installing or upgrading to vCenter Server 7.0, when you navigate to the Update panel within the vCenter Server Management Interface, the error message "Check the URL and try again" displays. The error message does not prevent you from using the functions within the Update panel, and you can view, stage, and install any available updates.

  Workaround: None.

Security Features Issues

• Encrypted virtual machine fails to power on when HA-enabled Trusted Cluster contains an unattested host

  In VMware® vSphere Trust Authority™, if you have enabled HA on the Trusted Cluster and one or more hosts in the cluster fails attestation, an encrypted virtual machine cannot power on.

  Workaround: Either remove or remediate all hosts that failed attestation from the Trusted Cluster.

• Encrypted virtual machine fails to power on when DRS-enabled Trusted Cluster contains an unattested host

  In VMware® vSphere Trust Authority™, if you have enabled DRS on the Trusted Cluster and one or more hosts in the cluster fails attestation, DRS might try to power on an encrypted virtual machine on an unattested host in the cluster. This operation puts the virtual machine in a locked state.

  Workaround: Either remove or remediate all hosts that failed attestation from the Trusted Cluster.

• Migrating or cloning encrypted virtual machines across vCenter Server instances fails when attempting to do so using the vSphere Client

  If you try to migrate or clone an encrypted virtual machine across vCenter Server instances using the vSphere Client, the operation fails with the following error message: "The operation is not allowed in the current state."

  Workaround: You must use the vSphere APIs to migrate or clone encrypted virtual machines across vCenter Server instances.

Networking Issues

• Reduced throughput in networking performance on Intel 82599/X540/X550 NICs

  The new queue-pair feature added to ixgben driver to improve networking performance on Intel 82599EB/X540/X550 series NICs might reduce throughput under some workloads in vSphere 7.0 as compared to vSphere 6.7.

  Workaround: To achieve the same networking performance as vSphere 6.7, you can disable the queue-pair with a module parameter. To disable the queue-pair, run the command:

  # esxcli system module parameters set -p "QPair=0,0,0,0..." -m ixgben

  After running the command, reboot.

• One or more I/O devices do not generate interrupts when the AMD IOMMU is in use

  If the I/O devices on your ESXi host provide more than a total of 512 distinct interrupt sources, some sources are erroneously assigned an interrupt-remapping table entry (IRTE) index in the AMD IOMMU that is greater than the maximum value. Interrupts from such a source are lost, so the corresponding I/O device behaves as if interrupts are disabled.

  Workaround: Use the ESXCLI command esxcli system settings kernel set -s iovDisableIR -v true to disable the AMD IOMMU interrupt remapper. Reboot the ESXi host so that the command takes effect.

• High throughput virtual machines may experience degradation in network performance when Network I/O Control (NetIOC) is enabled

  Virtual machines requiring high network throughput can experience throughput degradation when upgrading from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 7.0 with NetIOC enabled.

  Workaround: Adjust the ethernetx.ctxPerDev setting to enable multiple worlds.

• IPv6 traffic fails to pass through VMkernel ports using IPsec

  When you migrate VMkernel ports from one port group to another, IPv6 traffic does not pass through VMkernel ports using IPsec.

  Workaround: Remove the IPsec security association (SA) from the affected server, and then reapply the SA. To learn how to set and remove an IPsec SA, see the vSphere Security documentation.

• Higher ESX network performance with a portion of CPU usage increase

  ESX network performance may increase with a portion of CPU usage.

  Workaround: Remove and add the network interface with only 1 rx dispatch queue. For example:

  esxcli network ip interface remove --interface-name=vmk1

  esxcli network ip interface add --interface-name=vmk1 --num-rxqueue=1

• VM might lose Ethernet traffic after hot-add, hot-remove or storage vMotion

  A VM might stop receiving Ethernet traffic after a hot-add, hot-remove or storage vMotion. This issue affects VMs where the uplink of the VNIC has SR-IOV enabled. PVRDMA virtual NIC exhibits this issue when the uplink of the virtual network is a Mellanox RDMA capable NIC and RDMA namespaces are configured.

  Workaround: You can hot-remove and hot-add the affected Ethernet NICs of the VM to restore traffic. On Linux guest operating systems, restarting the network might also resolve the issue. If these workarounds have no effect, you can reboot the VM to restore network connectivity.

• Change of IP address for a VCSA deployed with static IP address requires that you create the DNS records in advance

  With the introduction of the DDNS, the DNS record update only works for VCSA deployed with DHCP configured networking. While changing the IP address of the vCenter server via VAMI, the following error is displayed:

  The specified IP address does not resolve to the specified hostname.

  Workaround: There are two possible workarounds.

  1. Create an additional DNS entry with the same FQDN and desired IP address. Log in to the VAMI and follow the steps to change the IP address.
  2. Log in to the VCSA using ssh. Execute the following script:

     ./opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

     Use option 6 to change the IP adddress of eth0. Once changed, execute the following script:

     ./opt/likewise/bin/lw-update-dns

     Restart all the services on the VCSA to update the IP information on the DNS server.

• It may take several seconds for the NSX Distributed Virtual Port Group (NSX DVPG) to be removed after deleting the corresponding logical switch in NSX Manager.

  As the number of logical switches increases, it may take more time for the NSX DVPG in vCenter Server to be removed after deleting the corresponding logical switch in NSX Manager. In an environment with 12000 logical switches, it takes approximately 10 seconds for an NSX DVPG to be deleted from vCenter Server.

  Workaround: None.

• Hostd runs out of memory and fails if a large number of NSX Distributed Virtual port groups are created.

  In vSphere 7.0, NSX Distributed Virtual port groups consume significantly larger amounts of memory than opaque networks. For this reason, NSX Distributed Virtual port groups can not support the same scale as an opaque network given the same amount of memory.

  Workaround:To support the use of NSX Distributed Virtual port groups, increase the amount of memory in your ESXi hosts. If you verify that your system has adequate memory to support your VMs, you can directly increase the memory of hostd using the following command.

  localcli --plugin-dir /usr/lib/vmware/esxcli/int/ sched group setmemconfig --group-path host/vim/vmvisor/hostd --units mb --min 2048 --max 2048

  Note that this will cause hostd to use memory normally reserved for your environment's VMs. This may have the affect of reducing the number of VMs your ESXi host can support.

• DRS may incorrectly launch vMotion if the network reservation is configured on a VM

  If the network reservation is configured on a VM, it is expected that DRS only migrates the VM to a host that meets the specified requirements. In a cluster with NSX transport nodes, if some of the transport nodes join the transport zone by NSX-T Virtual Distributed Switch (N-VDS), and others by vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) 7.0, DRS may incorrectly launch vMotion. You might encounter this issue when:

  • The VM connects to an NSX logical switch configured with a network reservation.
  • Some transport nodes join transport zone using N-VDS, and others by VDS 7.0, or, transport nodes join the transport zone through different VDS 7.0 instances.

  Workaround: Make all transport nodes join the transport zone by N-VDS or the same VDS 7.0 instance.

• When adding a VMkernel NIC (vmknic) to an NSX portgroup, vCenter Server reports the error "Connecting VMKernel adapter to a NSX Portgroup on a Stateless host is not a supported operation. Please use Distributed Port Group instead."
  • For stateless ESXi on Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS), the vmknic on a NSX port group is blocked. You must instead use a Distributed Port Group.
  • For stateful ESXi on DVS, vmknic on NSX port group is supported, but vSAN may have an issue if it is using vmknic on a NSX port group.

  Workaround: Use a Distributed Port Group on the same DVS.

• Enabling SRIOV from vCenter for QLogic 4x10GE QL41164HFCU CNA might fail

  If you navigate to the Edit Settings dialog for physical network adapters and attempt to enable SR-IOV, the operation might fail when using QLogic 4x10GE QL41164HFCU CNA. Attempting to enable SR-IOV might lead to a network outage of the ESXi host.

  Workaround: Use the following command on the ESXi host to enable SRIOV:

  esxcfg-module

• vCenter Server fails if the hosts in a cluster using Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) join NSX-T networking by a different Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) or combination of NSX-T Virtual Distributed Switch (NVDS) and VDS

  In vSphere 7.0, when using NSX-T networking on vSphere VDS with a DRS cluster, if the hosts do not join the NSX transport zone by the same VDS or NVDS, it can cause vCenter Server to fail.

  Workaround: Have hosts in a DRS cluster join the NSX transport zone using the same VDS or NVDS. 

Storage Issues

• VMFS datastores are not mounted automatically after disk hot remove and hot insert on HPE Gen10 servers with SmartPQI controllers

  When SATA disks on HPE Gen10 servers with SmartPQI controllers without expanders are hot removed and hot inserted back to a different disk bay of the same machine, or when multiple disks are hot removed and hot inserted back in a different order, sometimes a new local name is assigned to the disk. The VMFS datastore on that disk appears as a snapshot and will not be mounted back automatically because the device name has changed.

  Workaround: None. SmartPQI controller does not support unordered hot remove and hot insert operations.

• ESXi might terminate I/O to NVMeOF devices due to errors on all active paths

  Occasionally, all active paths to NVMeOF device register I/O errors due to link issues or controller state. If the status of one of the paths changes to Dead, the High Performance Plug-in (HPP) might not select another path if it shows high volume of errors. As a result, the I/O fails.

  Workaround: Disable the configuration option /Misc/HppManageDegradedPaths to unblock the I/O.

• VOMA check on NVMe based VMFS datastores fails with error

  VOMA check is not supported for NVMe based VMFS datastores and will fail with the error:

  ERROR: Failed to reserve device. Function not implemented 

  Example:

  # voma -m vmfs -f check -d /vmfs/devices/disks/: <partition#>
  Running VMFS Checker version 2.1 in check mode
  Initializing LVM metadata, Basic Checks will be done
  
  Checking for filesystem activity
  Performing filesystem liveness check..|Scanning for VMFS-6 host activity (4096 bytes/HB, 1024 HBs).
  ERROR: Failed to reserve device. Function not implemented
  Aborting VMFS volume check
  VOMA failed to check device : General Error

  Workaround: None. If you need to analyse VMFS metadata, collect it using the -l option, and pass to VMware customer support. The command for collecting the dump is:

  voma -l -f dump -d /vmfs/devices/disks/:<partition#> 

• Using the VM reconfigure API to attach an encrypted First Class Disk to an encrypted virtual machine might fail with error

  If an FCD and a VM are encrypted with different crypto keys, your attempts to attach the encrypted FCD to the encrypted VM using the VM reconfigure API might fail with the error message:

  Cannot decrypt disk because key or password is incorrect.

  Workaround: Use the attachDisk API rather than the VM reconfigure API to attach an encrypted FCD to an encrypted VM.

• ESXi host might get in non responding state if a non-head extent of its spanned VMFS datastore enters the Permanent Device Loss (PDL) state

  This problem does not occur when a non-head extent of the spanned VMFS datastore fails along with the head extent. In this case, the entire datastore becomes inaccessible and no longer allows I/Os.

  In contrast, when only a non-head extent fails, but the head extent remains accessible, the datastore heartbeat appears to be normal. And the I/Os between the host and the datastore continue. However, any I/Os that depend on the failed non-head extent start failing as well. Other I/O transactions might accumulate while waiting for the failing I/Os to resolve, and cause the host to enter the non responding state.

  Workaround: Fix the PDL condition of the non-head extent to resolve this issue.

• After recovering from APD or PDL conditions, VMFS datastore with enabled support for clustered virtual disks might remain inaccessible

  You can encounter this problem only on datastores where the clustered virtual disk support is enabled. When the datastore recovers from an All Paths Down (APD) or Permanent Device Loss (PDL) condition, it remains inaccessible. The VMkernel log might show multiple SCSI3 reservation conflict messages similar to the following:

  2020-02-18T07:41:10.273Z cpu22:1001391219)ScsiDeviceIO: vm 1001391219: SCSIDeviceCmdCompleteCB:2972: Reservation conflict retries 544 for command 0x45ba814b8340 (op: 0x89) to device "naa.624a9370b97601e346f64ba900024d53"

  The problem can occur because the ESXi host participating in the cluster loses SCSI reservations for the datastore and cannot always reacquire them automatically after the datastore recovers.

  Workaround: Manually register the reservation using the following command:

  vmkfstools -L registerkey /vmfs/devices/disks/<device name>

  where the <device name> is the name of the device on which the datastore is created.

• Virtual NVMe Controller is the default disk controller for Windows 10 guest operating systems

  The Virtual NVMe Controller is the default disk controller for the following guest operating systems when using Hardware Version 15 or later:

  Windows 10
  Windows Server 2016
  Windows Server 2019

  Some features might not be available when using a Virtual NVMe Controller. For more information, see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147714

  Note: Some clients use the previous default of LSI Logic SAS. This includes ESXi host client and PowerCLI.

  Workaround: If you need features not available on Virtual NVMe, switch to VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) or LSI Logic SAS. For information on using VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI), see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010398

• After an ESXi host upgrade to vSphere 7.0, presence of duplicate core claim rules might cause unexpected behavior

  Claim rules determine which multipathing plugin, such as NMP, HPP, and so on, owns paths to a particular storage device. ESXi 7.0 does not support duplicate claim rules. However, the ESXi 7.0 host does not alert you if you add duplicate rules to the existing claim rules inherited through an upgrade from a legacy release. As a result of using duplicate rules, storage devices might be claimed by unintended plugins, which can cause unexpected outcome.

  Workaround: Do not use duplicate core claim rules. Before adding a new claim rule, delete any existing matching claim rule.

• A CNS query with the compliance status filter set might take unusually long time to complete

  The CNS QueryVolume API enables you to obtain information about the CNS volumes, such as volume health and compliance status. When you check the compliance status of individual volumes, the results are obtained quickly. However, when you invoke the CNS QueryVolume API to check the compliance status of multiple volumes, several tens or hundreds, the query might perform slowly.

  Workaround: Avoid using bulk queries. When you need to get compliance status, query one volume at a time or limit the number of volumes in the query API to 20 or fewer. While using the query, avoid running other CNS operations to get the best performance.

• A VMFS datastore backed by an NVMe over Fabrics namespace or device might become permanently inaccessible after recovering from an APD or PDL failure

  If a VMFS datastore on an ESXi host is backed by an NVMe over Fabrics namespace or device, in case of an all paths down (APD) or permanent device loss (PDL) failure, the datastore might be inaccessible even after recovery. You cannot access the datastore from either the ESXi host or the vCenter Server system.

  Workaround: To recover from this state, perform a rescan on a host or cluster level. For more information, see Perform Storage Rescan.

• Deleted CNS volumes might temporarily appear as existing in the CNS UI

  After you delete an FCD disk that backs a CNS volume, the volume might still show up as existing in the CNS UI. However, your attempts to delete the volume fail. You might see an error message similar to the following:
  The object or item referred to could not be found.

  Workaround: The next full synchronization will resolve the inconsistency and correctly update the CNS UI.

• Attempts to attach multiple CNS volumes to the same pod might occasionally fail with an error

  When you attach multiple volumes to the same pod simultaneously, the attach operation might occasionally choose the same controller slot. As a result, only one of the operations succeeds, while other volume mounts fail.

  Workaround: After Kubernetes retries the failed operation, the operation succeeds if a controller slot is available on the node VM.

• Under certain circumstances, while a CNS operation fails, the task status appears as successful in the vSphere Client

  This might occur when, for example, you use an incompliant storage policy to create a CNS volume. The operation fails, while the vSphere Client shows the task status as successful.

  Workaround: The successful task status in the vSphere Client does not guarantee that the CNS operation succeeded. To make sure the operation succeeded, verify its results.

• Unsuccessful delete operation for a CNS persistent volume might leave the volume undeleted on the vSphere datastore

  This issue might occur when the CNS Delete API attempts to delete a persistent volume that is still attached to a pod. For example, when you delete the Kubernetes namespace where the pod runs. As a result, the volume gets cleared from CNS and  the CNS query operation does not return the volume. However, the volume continues to reside on the datastore and cannot be deleted through the repeated CNS Delete API operations.

  Workaround: None.

vCenter Server and vSphere Client Issues

• Vendor providers go offline after a PNID change​

  When you change the vCenter IP address (PNID change), the registered vendor providers go offline.

  Workaround: Re-register the vendor providers.

• Cross vCenter migration of a virtual machine fails with an error

  When you use cross vCenter vMotion to move a VM's storage and host to a different vCenter server instance, you might receive the error The operation is not allowed in the current state. 

  This error appears in the UI wizard after the Host Selection step and before the Datastore Selection step, in cases where the VM has an assigned storage policy containing host-based rules such as encryption or any other IO filter rule.

  Workaround: Assign the VM and its disks to a storage policy without host-based rules. You might need to decrypt the VM if the source VM is encrypted. Then retry the cross vCenter vMotion action.

• Storage Sensors information in Hardware Health tab shows incorrect values on vCenter UI, host UI, and MOB

  When you navigate to Host > Monitor > Hardware Health > Storage Sensors on vCenter UI, the storage information displays either incorrect or unknown values. The same issue is observed on the host UI and the MOB path “runtime.hardwareStatusInfo.storageStatusInfo” as well.

  Workaround: None.

• vSphere UI host advanced settings shows the current product locker location as empty with an empty default

  vSphere UI host advanced settings shows the current product locker location as empty with an empty default. This is inconsistent as the actual product location symlink is created and valid. This causes confusion to the user. The default cannot be corrected from UI.

  Workaround: User can use the esxcli command on the host to correct the current product locker location default as below.

  1. Remove the existing Product Locker Location setting with: "esxcli system settings advanced remove -o ProductLockerLocation"

  2. Re-add the Product Locker Location setting with the appropriate default:

        2.a.  If the ESXi is a full installation, the default value is "/locker/packages/vmtoolsRepo" export PRODUCT_LOCKER_DEFAULT="/locker/packages/vmtoolsRepo"

        2.b. If the ESXi is a PXEboot configuration such as autodeploy, the default value is: "/vmtoolsRepo" export PRODUCT_LOCKER_DEFAULT="/vmtoolsRepo"

        Run the following command to automatically figure out the location: export PRODUCT_LOCKER_DEFAULT=`readlink /productLocker`

        Add the setting: esxcli system settings advanced add -d "Path to VMware Tools repository" -o ProductLockerLocation -t string -s $PRODUCT_LOCKER_DEFAULT

  You can combine all the above steps in step 2 by issuing the single command:

  esxcli system settings advanced add -d "Path to VMware Tools repository" -o ProductLockerLocation -t string -s `readlink /productLocker`

• Linked Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) vCenter Server instances appear in the on-premises vSphere Client if a vCenter Cloud Gateway is linked to the SDDC.

  When a vCenter Cloud Gateway is deployed in the same environment as an on-premises vCenter Server, and linked to an SDDC, the SDDC vCenter Server will appear in the on-premises vSphere Client. This is unexpected behavior and the linked SDDC vCenter Server should be ignored. All operations involving the linked SDDC vCenter Server should be performed on the vSphere Client running within the vCenter Cloud Gateway.

  Workaround: None.

Virtual Machine Management Issues

• Virtual machines with enabled AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES) cannot create Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) sockets

  Performance and functionality of features that require VMCI might be affected on virtual machines with enabled AMD SEV-ES, because such virtual machines cannot create VMCI sockets.

  Workaround: None.

• The postcustomization section of the customization script runs before the guest customization

  When you run the guest customization script for a Linux guest operating system, the precustomization section of the customization script that is defined in the customization specification runs before the guest customization and the postcustomization section runs after that. If you enable Cloud-Init in the guest operating system of a virtual machine, the postcustomization section runs before the customization due to a known issue in Cloud-Init.

  Workaround: Disable Cloud-Init and use the standard guest customization. 

• Group migration operations in vSphere vMotion, Storage vMotion, and vMotion without shared storage fail with error

  When you perform group migration operations on VMs with multiple disks and multi-level snapshots, the operations might fail with the error com.vmware.vc.GenericVmConfigFault Failed waiting for data. Error 195887167. Connection closed by remote host, possibly due to timeout.

  Workaround: Retry the migration operation on the failed VMs one at a time.

• Deploying an OVF or OVA template from a URL fails with a 403 Forbidden error

  The URLs that contain an HTTP query parameter are not supported. For example, http://webaddress.com?file=abc.ovf or the Amazon pre-signed S3 URLs.

  Workaround: Download the files and deploy them from your local file system.

• Importing or deploying local OVF files containing non-ASCII characters in their name might fail with an error

  When you import local .ovf files containing non-ASCII characters in their name, you might receive 400 Bad Request Error. When you use such .ovf files to deploy a virtual machine in the vSphere Client, the deployment process stops at 0%. As a result, you might receive 400 Bad Request Error or 500 Internal Server Error.

  Workaround:

  1. Remove the non-ASCII characters from the .ovf and .vmdk file names.
     • To edit the .ovf file, open it with a text editor.
     • Search the non-ASCII .vmdk file name and change it to ASCII.
  2. Import or deploy the saved files again. 
• The third level of nested objects in a virtual machine folder is not visible

  Perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to a data center and create a virtual machine folder.
  2. In the virtual machine folder, create a nested virtual machine folder.
  3. In the second folder, create another nested virtual machine, virtual machine folder, vApp, or VM Template.

  As a result, from the VMs and Templates inventory tree you cannot see the objects in the third nested folder.

  Workaround: To see the objects in the third nested folder, navigate to the second nested folder and select the VMs tab.

vSphere HA and Fault Tolerance Issues

• VMs in a cluster might be orphaned after recovering from storage inaccessibility such as a cluster wide APD

  Some VMs might be in orphaned state after cluster wide APD recovers, even if HA and VMCP are enabled on the cluster.

  This issue might be encountered when the following conditions occur simultaneously:

  • All hosts in the cluster experience APD and do not recover until VMCP timeout is reached.
  • HA primary initiates failover due to APD on a host.
  • Power on API during HA failover fails due to one of the following:
    • APD across the same host
    • Cascading APD across the entire cluster
    • Storage issues
    • Resource unavailability
  • FDM unregistration and VCs steal VM logic might initiate during a window where FDM has not unregistered the failed VM and VC's host synchronization responds that multiple hosts are reporting the same VM. Both FDM and VC unregister the different registered copies of the same VM from different hosts, causing the VM to be orphaned.

   

  Workaround: You must unregister and reregister the orphaned VMs manually within the cluster after the APD recovers.

  If you do not manually reregister the orphaned VMs, HA attempts failover of the orphaned VMs, but it might take between 5 to 10 hours depending on when APD recovers.

  The overall functionality of the cluster is not affected in these cases and HA will continue to protect the VMs. This is an anomaly in what gets displayed on VC for the duration of the problem.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager Issues

• You cannot enable NSX-T on a cluster that is already enabled for managing image setup and updates on all hosts collectively

  NSX-T is not compatible with the vSphere Lifecycle Manager functionality for image management. When you enable a cluster for image setup and updates on all hosts in the cluster collectively, you cannot enable NSX-T on that cluster. However, you can deploy NSX Edges to this cluster.

  Workaround: Move the hosts to a new cluster that you can manage with baselines and enable NSX-T on that new cluster.

• vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSAN File Services cannot be simultaneously enabled on a vSAN cluster in vSphere 7.0 release

  If vSphere Lifecycle Manager is enabled on a cluster, vSAN File Services cannot be enabled on the same cluster and vice versa. In order to enable vSphere Lifecycle Manager on a cluster, which has VSAN File Services enabled already, first disable vSAN File Services and retry the operation. Please note that if you transition to a cluster that is managed by a single image, vSphere Lifecycle Manager cannot be disabled on that cluster.

  Workaround: None.

• ESXi 7.0 hosts cannot be added to а cluster that you manage with a single image by using vSphere Auto Deploy

  Attempting to add ESXi hosts to а cluster that you manage with a single image by using the "Add to Inventory" workflow in vSphere Auto Deploy fails. The failure occurs because no patterns are matched in an existing Auto Deploy ruleset. The task fails silently and the hosts remain in the Discovered Hosts tab.

  Workaround:

  1. Remove the ESXi hosts that did not match the ruleset from the Discovered Hosts tab.
  2. Create a rule or edit an existing Auto Deploy rule, where the host target location is a cluster managed by an image.
  3. Reboot the hosts.

   

  The hosts are added to the cluster that you manage by an image in vSphere Lifecycle Manager.

• When a hardware support manager is unavailable, vSphere High Availability (HA) functionality is impacted

  If hardware support manager is unavailable for a cluster that you manage with a single image, where a firmware and drivers addon is selected and vSphere HA is enabled, the vSphere HA functionality is impacted. You may experience the following errors.

  • Configuring vSphere HA on a cluster fails.
  • Cannot complete the configuration of the vSphere HA agent on a host: Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure.
  • Remediating vSphere HA fails: A general system error occurred: Failed to get Effective Component map.
  • Disabling vSphere HA fails: Delete Solution task failed. A general system error occurred: Cannot find hardware support package from depot or hardware support manager.

   

  Workaround:

  • If the hardware support manager is temporarily unavailable, perform the following steps.
  1. Reconnect the hardware support manager to vCenter Server.
  2. Select a cluster from the Hosts and Cluster menu.
  3. Select the Configure tab.
  4. Under Services, click vSphere Availability.
  5. Re-enable vSphere HA.
  • If the hardware support manager is permanently unavailable, perform the following steps.
  1. Remove the hardware support manager and the hardware support package from the image specification
  2. Re-enable vSphere HA.
  3. Select a cluster from the Hosts and Cluster menu.
  4. Select the Updates tab.
  5. Click Edit .
  6. Remove the firmware and drivers addon and click Save.
  7. Select the Configure tab.
  8. Under Services, click vSphere Availability.
  9. Re-enable vSphere HA.

   

• I/OFilter is not removed from a cluster after a remediation process in vSphere Lifecycle Manager

  Removing I/OFilter from a cluster by remediating the cluster in vSphere Lifecycle Manager, fails with the following error message: iofilter XXX already exists. Тhe iofilter remains listed as installed.

  Workaround:

  1. Call IOFilter API UninstallIoFilter_Task from the vCenter Server managed object (IoFilterManager).
  2. Remediate the cluster in vSphere Lifecycle Manager.
  3. Call IOFilter API ResolveInstallationErrorsOnCluster_Task from the vCenter Server managed object (IoFilterManager) to update the database.

   

• While remediating a vSphere HA enabled cluster in vSphere Lifecycle Manager, adding hosts causes a vSphere HA error state

  Adding one or multiple ESXi hosts during a remediation process of a vSphere HA enabled cluster, results in the following error message: Applying HA VIBs on the cluster encountered a failure.

  Workaround: Аfter the cluster remediation operation has finished, perform one of the following tasks.

  • Right-click the failed ESXi host and select Reconfigure for vSphere HA.
  • Disable and re-enable vSphere HA for the cluster.

   

• While remediating a vSphere HA enabled cluster in vSphere Lifecycle Manager, disabling and re-enabling vSphere HA causes a vSphere HA error state

  Disabling and re-enabling vSphere HA during remediation process of a cluster, may fail the remediation process due to vSphere HA health checks reporting that hosts don't have vSphere HA VIBs installed. You may see the following error message: Setting desired image spec for cluster failed.

  Workaround: Аfter the cluster remediation operation has finished, disable and re-enable vSphere HA for the cluster.

• Checking for recommended images in vSphere Lifecycle Manager has slow performance in large clusters

  In large clusters with more than 16 hosts, the recommendation generation task could take more than an hour to finish or may appear to hang. The completion time for the recommendation task depends on the number of devices configured on each host and the number of image candidates from the depot that vSphere Lifecycle Manager needs to process before obtaining a valid image to recommend.

  Workaround: None.

• Checking for hardware compatibility in vSphere Lifecycle Manager has slow performance in large clusters

  In large clusters with more than 16 hosts, the validation report generation task could take up to 30 minutes to finish or may appear to hang. The completion time depends on the number of devices configured on each host and the number of hosts configured in the cluster.

  Workaround: None

• Incomplete error messages in non-English languages are displayed, when remediating a cluster in vSphere Lifecycle Manager

  You can encounter incomplete error messages for localized languages in the vCenter Server user interface. The messages are displayed, after a cluster remediation process in vSphere Lifecycle Manager fails. For example, your can observe the following error message.
  
  The error message in English language: Virtual machine 'VMC on DELL EMC -FileServer' that runs on cluster 'Cluster-1' reported an issue which prevents entering maintenance mode: Unable to access the virtual machine configuration: Unable to access file[local-0] VMC on Dell EMC - FileServer/VMC on Dell EMC - FileServer.vmx
  
  The error message in French language: La VM « VMC on DELL EMC -FileServer », située sur le cluster « {Cluster-1} », a signalé un problème empêchant le passage en mode de maintenance : Unable to access the virtual machine configuration: Unable to access file[local-0] VMC on Dell EMC - FileServer/VMC on Dell EMC - FileServer.vmx

  Workaround: None.

• Importing an image with no vendor addon, components, or firmware and drivers addon to a cluster which image contains such elements, does not remove the image elements of the existing image

  Only the ESXi base image is replaced with the one from the imported image.

  Workaround: After the import process finishes, edit the image, and if needed, remove the vendor addon, components, and firmware and drivers addon.

• When you convert a cluster that uses baselines to a cluster that uses a single image, a warning is displayed that vSphere HA VIBs will be removed

  Converting a vSphere HA enabled cluster that uses baselines to a cluster that uses a single image, may result a warning message displaying that vmware-fdm component will be removed.

  Workaround: This message can be ignored. The conversion process installs the vmware-fdm component.

• If vSphere Update Manager is configured to download patch updates from the Internet through a proxy server, after upgrade to vSphere 7.0 that converts Update Manager to vSphere Lifecycle Manager, downloading patches from VMware patch repository might fail

  In earlier releases of vCenter Server you could configure independent proxy settings for vCenter Server and vSphere Update Manager. After an upgrade to vSphere 7.0, vSphere Update Manager service becomes part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager service. For the vSphere Lifecycle Manager service, the proxy settings are configured from the vCenter Server appliance settings. If you had configured Update Manager to download patch updates from the Internet through a proxy server but the vCenter Server appliance had no proxy setting configuration, after a vCenter Server upgrade to version 7.0, the vSphere Lifecycle Manager fails to connect to the VMware depot and is unable to download patches or updates.

  Workaround: Log in to the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface, https://vcenter-server-appliance-FQDN-or-IP-address:5480, to configure proxy settings for the vCenter Server appliance and enable vSphere Lifecycle Manager to use proxy.

Miscellaneous Issues

• When applying a host profile with version 6.5 to a ESXi host with version 7.0, the compliance check fails

  Applying a host profile with version 6.5 to a ESXi host with version 7.0, results in Coredump file profile reported as not compliant with the host.

  Workaround: There are two possible workarounds.

  1. When you create a host profile with version 6.5, set an advanced configuration option VMkernel.Boot.autoCreateDumpFile to false on the ESXi host.
  2. When you apply an existing host profile with version 6.5, add an advanced configuration option VMkernel.Boot.autoCreateDumpFile in the host profile, configure the option to a fixed policy, and set value to false.

   

• The Actions drop-down menu does not contain any items when your browser is set to language different from English

  When your browser is set to language different from English and you click the Switch to New View button from the virtual machine Summary tab of the vSphere Client inventory, the Actions drop-down menu in the Guest OS panel does not contain any items.

  Workaround: Select the Actions drop-down menu on the top of the virtual machine page.

• Mellanox ConnectX-4 or ConnectX-5 native ESXi drivers might exhibit minor throughput degradation when Dynamic Receive Side Scaling (DYN_RSS) or Generic RSS (GEN_RSS) feature is turned on

  Mellanox ConnectX-4 or ConnectX-5 native ESXi drivers might exhibit less than 5 percent throughput degradation when DYN_RSS and GEN_RSS feature is turned on, which is unlikely to impact normal workloads.

  Workaround: You can disable DYN_RSS and GEN_RSS feature with the following commands:

  # esxcli system module parameters set -m nmlx5_core -p "DYN_RSS=0 GEN_RSS=0"

  # reboot

• RDMA traffic between two VMs on the same host might fail in PVRDMA environment

  In a vSphere 7.0 implementation of a PVRDMA environment, VMs pass traffic through the HCA for local communication if an HCA is present. However, loopback of RDMA traffic does not work on qedrntv driver.  For instance, RDMA Queue Pairs running on VMs that are configured under same uplink port cannot communicate with each other.

  In vSphere 6.7 and earlier, HCA was used for local RDMA traffic if SRQ was enabled. vSphere 7.0 uses HCA loopback with VMs using versions of PVRDMA that have SRQ enabled with a minimum of HW v14 using RoCE v2.

  The current version of Marvell FastLinQ adapter firmware does not support loopback traffic between QPs of the same PF or port.

  Workaround: Required support is being added in the out-of-box driver certified for vSphere 7.0. If you are using the inbox qedrntv driver, you must use a 3-host configuration and migrate VMs to the third host.

• Unreliable Datagram traffic QP limitations in qedrntv driver

  There are limitations with the Marvell FastLinQ qedrntv RoCE driver and Unreliable Datagram (UD) traffic. UD applications involving bulk traffic might fail with qedrntv driver. Additionally, UD QPs can only work with DMA Memory Regions (MR). Physical MRs or FRMR are not supported. Applications attempting to use physical MR or FRMR along with UD QP fail to pass traffic when used with qedrntv driver. Known examples of such test applications are ibv_ud_pingpong and ib_send_bw.

  Standard RoCE and RoCEv2 use cases in a VMware ESXi environment such as iSER, NVMe-oF (RoCE) and PVRDMA are not impacted by this issue. Use cases for UD traffic are limited and this issue impacts a small set of applications requiring bulk UD traffic.

  Marvell FastLinQ hardware does not support RDMA UD traffic offload. In order to meet the VMware PVRDMA requirement to support GSI QP, a restricted software only implementation of UD QP support was added to the qedrntv driver. The goal of the implementation is to provide support for control path GSI communication and is not a complete implementation of UD QP supporting bulk traffic and advanced features.

  Since UD support is implemented in software, the implementation might not keep up with heavy traffic and packets might be dropped. This can result in failures with bulk UD traffic.

  Workaround: Bulk UD QP traffic is not supported with qedrntv driver and there is no workaround at this time. VMware ESXi RDMA (RoCE) use cases like iSER, NVMe, RDMA and PVRDMA are unaffected by this issue.

• Servers equipped with QLogic 578xx NIC might fail when frequently connecting or disconnecting iSCSI LUNs

  If you trigger QLogic 578xx NIC iSCSI connection or disconnection frequently in a short time, the server might fail due to an issue with the qfle3 driver. This is caused by a known defect in the device's firmware.

  Workaround: None.

• ESXi might fail during driver unload or controller disconnect operation in Broadcom NVMe over FC environment

  In Broadcom NVMe over FC environment, ESXi might fail during driver unload or controller disconnect operation and display an error message such as: @BlueScreen: #PF Exception 14 in world 2098707:vmknvmeGener IP 0x4200225021cc addr 0x19

  Workaround: None.

• ESXi does not display OEM firmware version number of i350/X550 NICs on some Dell servers

  The inbox ixgben driver only recognizes firmware data version or signature for i350/X550 NICs. On some Dell servers the OEM firmware version number is programmed into the OEM package version region, and the inbox ixgben driver does not read this information. Only the 8-digit firmware signature is displayed.

  Workaround: To display the OEM firmware version number, install async ixgben driver version 1.7.15 or later.

• X710 or XL710 NICs might fail in ESXi

  When you initiate certain destructive operations to X710 or XL710 NICs, such as resetting the NIC or manipulating VMKernel's internal device tree, the NIC hardware might read data from non-packet memory.

  Workaround: Do not reset the NIC or manipulate vmkernel internal device state.

• NVMe-oF does not guarantee persistent VMHBA name after system reboot

  NVMe-oF is a new feature in vSphere 7.0. If your server has a USB storage installation that uses vmhba30+ and also has NVMe over RDMA configuration, the VMHBA name might change after a system reboot. This is because the VMHBA name assignment for NVMe over RDMA is different from PCIe devices. ESXi does not guarantee persistence.

  Workaround: None.

• Backup fails for vCenter database size of 300 GB or greater

  If the vCenter database size is 300 GB or greater, the file-based backup will fail with a timeout. The following error message is displayed: Timeout! Failed to complete in 72000 seconds

  Workaround: None.

• A restore of vCenter Server 7.0 which is upgraded from vCenter Server 6.x with External Platform Services Controller to vCenter Server 7.0 might fail

  When you restore a vCenter Server 7.0 which is upgraded from 6.x with External Platform Services Controller to vCenter Server 7.0, the restore might fail and display the following error: Failed to retrieve appliance storage list

  Workaround: During the first stage of the restore process, increase the storage level of the vCenter Server 7.0. For example if the vCenter Server 6.7 External Platform Services Controller setup storage type is small, select storage type large for the restore process.

• Enabled SSL protocols configuration parameter is not configured during a host profile remediation process

  Enabled SSL protocols configuration parameter is not configured during a host profile remediation and only the system default protocol tlsv1.2 is enabled. This behavior is observed for a host profile with version 7.0 and earlier in a vCenter Server 7.0 environment.

  Workaround: To enable TLSV 1.0 or TLSV 1.1 SSL protocols for SFCB, log in to an ESXi host by using SSH, and run the following ESXCLI command: esxcli system wbem -P <protocol_name>

• Unable to configure Lockdown Mode settings by using Host Profiles

  Lockdown Мode cannot be configured by using a security host profile and cannot be applied to multiple ESXi hosts at once. You must manually configure each host.  

  Workaround: In vCenter Server 7.0, you can configure Lockdown Mode and manage Lockdown Mode exception user list by using a security host profile.

• When a host profile is applied to a cluster, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) settings are missing from the ESXi hosts

  Some settings in the VMware config file /etc/vmware/config are not managed by Host Profiles and are blocked, when the config file is modified. As a result, when the host profile is applied to a cluster, the EVC settings are lost, which causes loss of EVC functionalities. For example, unmasked CPUs can be exposed to workloads.

  Workaround: Reconfigure the relevant EVC baseline on cluster to recover the EVC settings.

• Using a host profile that defines a core dump partition in vCenter Server 7.0 results in an error

  In vCenter Server 7.0, configuring and managing a core dump partition in a host profile is not available. Attempting to apply a host profile that defines a core dump partition, results in the following error: No valid coredump partition found.

  Workaround: None. In vCenter Server 7.0., Host Profiles supports only file-based core dumps.

• If you run the ESXCLI command to unload the firewall module, the hostd service fails and ESXi hosts lose connectivity

  If you automate the firewall configuration in an environment that includes multiple ESXi hosts, and run the ESXCLI command esxcli network firewall unload that destroys filters and unloads the firewall module, the hostd service fails and ESXi hosts lose connectivity.

  Workaround: Unloading the firewall module is not recommended at any time. If you must unload the firewall module, use the following steps:

  1. Stop the hostd service by using the command:
     /etc/init.d/hostd stop.
  2. Unload the firewall module by using the command:
     esxcli network firewall unload.
  3. Perform the required operations.
  4. Load the firewall module by using the command:
     esxcli network firewall load.
  5. Start the hostd service by using the command:
     /etc/init.d/hostd start.
• vSphere Storage vMotion operations might fail in a vSAN environment due to an unauthenticated session of the Network File Copy (NFC) manager

  Migrations to a vSAN datastore by using vSphere Storage vMotion of virtual machines that have at least one snapshot and more than one virtual disk with different storage policy might fail. The issue occurs due to an unauthenticated session of the NFC manager because the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) body exceeds the allowed size.

  Workaround: First migrate the VM home namespace and just one of the virtual disks. After the operation completes, perform a disk only migration of the remaining 2 disks. 

• Changes in the properties and attributes of the devices and storage on an ESXi host might not persist after a reboot

  If the device discovery routine during a reboot of an ESXi host times out, the jumpstart plug-in might not receive all configuration changes of the devices and storage from all the registered devices on the host. As a result, the process might restore the properties of some devices or storage to the default values after the reboot.

  Workaround: Manually restore the changes in the properties of the affected device or storage.

• If you use a beta build of ESXi 7.0, ESXi hosts might fail with a purple diagnostic screen during some lifecycle operations

  If you use a beta build of ESXi 7.0, ESXi hosts might fail with a purple diagnostic screen during some lifecycle operations such as unloading a driver or switching between ENS mode and native driver mode. For example, if you try to change the ENS mode, in the backtrace you see an error message similar to: case ENS::INTERRUPT::NoVM_DeviceStateWithGracefulRemove hit BlueScreen: ASSERT bora/vmkernel/main/dlmalloc.c:2733 This issue is specific for beta builds and does not affect release builds such as ESXi 7.0.

  Workaround: Update to ESXi 7.0 GA.

• HTTP requests from certain libraries to vSphere might be rejected

  The HTTP reverse proxy in vSphere 7.0 enforces stricter standard compliance than in previous releases. This might expose pre-existing problems in some third-party libraries used by applications for SOAP calls to vSphere.

  If you develop vSphere applications that use such libraries or include applications that rely on such libraries in your vSphere stack, you might experience connection issues when these libraries send HTTP requests to VMOMI. For example, HTTP requests issued from vijava libraries can take the following form:

  POST /sdk HTTP/1.1
  SOAPAction
  Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
  User-Agent: Java/1.8.0_221

  The syntax in this example violates an HTTP protocol header field requirement that mandates a colon after SOAPAction. Hence, the request is rejected in flight.

  Workaround: Developers leveraging noncompliant libraries in their applications can consider using a library that follows HTTP standards instead. For example, developers who use the vijava library can consider using the latest version of the yavijava library instead.

• Editing an advanced options parameter in a host profile and setting a value to false, results in setting the value to true

  When attempting to set a value to false for an advanced option parameter in a host profile, the user interface creates a non-empty string value. Values that are not empty are interpreted as true and the advanced option parameter receives a true value in the host profile.

  Workaround: There are two possible workarounds.

  • Set the advanced option parameter to false on a reference ESXi host and copy settings from this host in Host Profiles.
    Note: The host must be compliant with the host profile before modifying the advanced option parameter on the host.
  • Set the advanced option parameter to false on a reference ESXi host and create a host profile from this host. Then copy the host profile settings from the new host profile to the existing host profile.

   

• You might see a dump file when using Broadcom driver lsi_msgpt3, lsi_msgpt35 and lsi_mr3

  When using the lsi_msgpt3, lsi_msgpt35 and lsi_mr3 controllers, there is a potential risk to see dump file lsuv2-lsi-drivers-plugin-util-zdump. There is an issue when exiting the storelib used in this plugin utility. There is no impact on ESXi operations, you can ignore the dump file.

  Workaround: You can safely ignore this message. You can remove the lsuv2-lsi-drivers-plugin with the following command:
  
  esxcli software vib remove -n lsuv2-lsiv2-drivers-plugin

• You might see reboot is not required after configuring SR-IOV of a PCI device in vCenter, but device configurations made by third party extensions might be lost and require reboot to be re-applied.

  In ESXi 7.0, SR-IOV configuration is applied without a reboot and the device driver is reloaded. ESXi hosts might have third party extensions perform device configurations that need to run after the device driver is loaded during boot. A reboot is required for those third party extensions to re-apply the device configuration.

  Workaround: You must reboot after configuring SR-IOV to apply third party device configurations.

To collapse the list of previous known issues, click here.