patch – Darwin Mach

By Darwin Mach on Information Security, News, Tech Tips tagged 5.0.0, ESXi, hypervisor, patch, virtualization, vmwarewith 1 Comment

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.

By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged acrobat, adobe, deploy, install, installer, integrated, msi, msp, patch, professional, slipstream, windowswith 6 Comments

“Slipstream” Adobe Acrobat Pro Updates

Seems like one of those really annoying things out there is deploying an installation of Adobe Acrobat Pro with all (or most) of the updates at once. Of course, this pertains to the Windows version. After doing some intense research and looking through the bits and pieces if suggestions that are out there, I found a much easier way to integrate all the updates into one package.

This one is tricky, you can’t just use the traditional method of running msiexec with the /p parameter and patch over the MSI. What makes it worse is that certain updates can’t be slip streamed or they will prevent future updates from being applied. One can only imagine the headaches that can come out of trying to deploy this without having to install the numerous patches after.

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