VMWare ESXi 5 Auto Start/Shutdown
VMWare recently, (and quietly) published a patch I have confirmed will resolve a guest virtual machine startup and shutdown issue that was introduced in March 2012 when they released Update 1.
The issue was that it broke the automatic startup and shutdown of the guest virtual machines when the host machine boots or shuts down. This did not affect enterprise customers who use a cluster, but vastly impacted many of us running individual nodes. Not surprisingly, this only affected the free version of the hypervisor and took 4 months before they decided to fix it due to 1.) community outrage and 2.) the issue extending to some paying enterprise customers.
The patch is ESXi500-201207001 and can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal. Just search for ESXi 5.0.0. Please note that if you aren’t running the latest patch before this one, you will need to update them sequentially before applying this patch.
As a note to the folks at VMWare: You guys barely averted losing your edge as a virtualization market leader due to angry users. This is not the first time either.