Happy New Year!  I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday’s and got to spend some time with friends and family.  If your reading this I suggest you pay tribute to the quality of Virtual Insanity, and give the gift of voting.  Eric Siebert has released a “best of 2009 blog contest”.  If Virtual Insanity has helped you out in some way in the past I suggest casting a vote for this great virtualization blog space!  Ok onto the real reason for this post…

I ran into an oddity while bringing a new host online today into our vSphere environment.  And thought it best to publish my findings.  Hopefully this might save someone a support call.  With vSphere 4 update 1 came a couple of technical issues, which are detailed here and here.  Personally we don’t use ESXi so only the first one was a major issue for us.  We are an HP shop, so the issue around the HP agents and update 1 was a major concern (basically would render the host unbootable).  Luckily VMware support is proactive about announcing issues like this to the community and most people were aware of the problem right away.

The problem I hit today was strange and I thought it was just being off from work for a week.  I went to apply our update 1 baseline to a new host I was bringing up, rescanned, and then got this:

What the?  I know this isn’t compliant, our base build is still at 4.0  Check out the build number, that’s proof.  I have used the update 1 baseline for 50+ hosts so I know it’s not that.  So maybe update manager is still on holiday as well, I restart the service and life is good?  Nope.  Same thing.

To make a long story longer, I poke around in the repository and check the update 1 patch and see it’s valid, yep 11/19/09 that’s the right release date.  Why is this thing not working?

I kept poking and prodding thinking maybe they released an update to the update?  Sure enough it slipped by me when I wasn’t looking, or it went to my spam mail.  Check the date 12/9/09.

I created a new test baseline, and dropped the 12/9/09 update 1 into it and applied it to my new host.  Low and behold:

That’s much better.  Strange the older update 1 patch didn’t reflect anything and showed compliant.  As an end user I would have liked to have seen some type of error message, or a reference to the newer released update 1.  Ran the new update, (still stopped the HP agents just in case).  And now things look good again (build number):

Conclusion

Go vote for this site, and make sure you update your update manager, update 1 baseline.  That’s a lot of updates.  See you online!

Scott