VMware ESX – “Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1 on HP Proliant systems can fail or time out and leave the host in an unusable state if the host has HP Insight Management Agents running”

With many of you upgrading to the recently released ESX 4.0 Update 1 the the following is a potentially high impact issue for many of you with HP Proliant based VMware ESX instances.

If you are running VMware ESX on HP Proliant servers with the HP Insight Agents installed and running then you may receive one of the following issues (from the VMWare Knowledge article here) when upgrading from ESX 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1:

• Upgrade operation may fail or hang and can result in an incomplete installation
• Upon reboot, the host that was being upgraded may be left in an inconsistent state and may display a purple diagnostic screen with the following error:
  COS Panic: Int3 @ mp_register_ioapic

IMPORTANT: If you have already taken the plunge and updated your HP Proliant(s) to ESX 4.0 U1 whilst the Insight Agents were still running then VMware’s advice is “DO NOT REBOOT THE ESX HOST” and open a support request with VMware support.

VMware and HP are “investigating interactions between VMware esxupdate tool and HP Insight Management Agents for a possible solution” so there should hopefully be a fix sometime soon.  That said, this issue is easy enough to work around by simply stopping and disabling the agents before upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1.

This VMware Knowledgebase article here gives instructions on how to do this along with further information on this issue.

In most instances this will only affect HP Proliant 300 series servers and above as the 100 series of Proliants such as the ML110 or ML115 do not successfully run the agents in the first place and can cause a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD).