PSA: vSphere Patch can break working NVIDIA GRiD set ups. (And don’t look directly at the sun #SolarEclipse2017)

I was working with a client today and going nuts trying to figure out why the NVIDIA VIB was not loading correctly in the vSphere 6.0 environment.  We pushed the VIB via Update Manager like I have done in the past. (See Note Here) Yet the XORG service was refusing to start.  XORG is needed for shared vGPUs.  If you do 1 to 1 pass-through, you can get away with out it.

No errors in the Xorg.log but you can see the issue when trying to restart it manually.   Unknown command or namespace graphics host refresh.  Not terribly useful but unique enough that a little Google-Fu lead me to this KB article. 

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150498 – After upgrading ESXi hosts to ESXi600-201706001 Hardware 3D graphics functioning fails

As of today, there is no resolution for this fix so be very careful when upgrading any ESXi hosts with NVIDIA GRiD cards in them.

So at this point, our only option is to rebuild the hosts using an older version of ESX that does not have the patch installed.  Since the patch was released on June 6, 2017, I would advise using the 6.0U3 ISO released on February 24, 2017 and then carefully patching it up to a newer build version being sure to NOT apply patch ESXi600-201706103-SG.

If all goes well, the vGPUs should be available again for the Virtual Machines to use.

Oh and Next eclipse : April 8th 2024.