Important Information on ESXi 7 Update 3

VMware select customers have encountered issues while upgrading their environments to the ESXi 7 Update 3 release.

After careful consideration, VMware removed the ESXi 7 Update 3 release from our Product Downloads site. VMware made this decision to protect our customers from potential failures which may occur as they upgrade to ESXi 7 Update 3. While we believe that this would only impact a limited set of customers, it was serious enough for us to take the action. When we have resolved the upgrade issues in ESXi 7 Update 3, we will notify our customers that they may resume upgrades to ESXi 7 Update 3 at that time. For more details on the underlying issues, please refer to KB article 86398.

Our review process uncovered partner driver interoperability problems which prevented certain upgrade paths from completing in some customer environments. Specifically, driver VIB changes caused naming collisions in ESXi. This resulted in upgrade failures and related HA failures. Unfortunately, our quality testing and certification process missed this issue. We investigated options to address it with patches, however, due to certain operational complexities for our customers we removed the ESXi 7 Update 3 release from our download site.

Note that the VMware vCenter Server 7 Update 3 release remains stable and available. Customers may continue to download and upgrade to this latest vCenter Server release.

For customers who have already successfully upgraded to ESXi 7 Update 3, you may remain on this release and will have full support from VMware.

We will reissue ESXi 7 Update 3 as soon as we have the driver issues fully resolved–which involves working with our partners. Customers will be notified when the release is available via our normal release notifications, including a post on this vSphere Blog site.

Customer Quality Focus

VMware vSphere is used in the most mission-critical customer environments, and we take any escaped defects seriously. In addition to delivering an updated release, we are also focused on these continuous improvements:

• We have a stringent Root Cause and Corrective Action (RCCA) process to continually identify quality improvements we can make on a go-forward basis.
• We treat update releases like major releases and keep our customers informed by publishing a KB article for each update release with a running list of any critical defects and workarounds.
• We are also looking at further increasing transparency for subsequent releases by publishing quality metrics that are accessible both internally and externally.

Trust is one of the most important features we deliver with our products. VMware is committed to providing customers with a quality experience that also protects the integrity and security of their data and systems.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!