VMware ESXi and ESX Denial of Service and third party updates for Likewise components and ESX Service Console

a. ESX/ESXi Socket ExhaustionBy sending malicious network traffic to an ESXi or ESX host an attacker could exhaust the available sockets which would prevent further connections to the host. In the event a host becomes inaccessible its virtual machines will continue to run and have network connectivity but a reboot of the ESXi or ESX host may be required in order to be able to connect to the host again. ESXi and ESX hosts may intermittently lose connectivity caused by applications that do not correctly close sockets. If this occurs an error message similar to the following may be written to the vpxa log: socket() returns -1 (Cannot allocate memory) An error message similar to the following may be written to the vmkernel logs: socreate(type=2, proto=17) failed with error 55 VMware would like to thank Jimmy Scott at inet-solutions.be for reporting this issue to us. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2011-1785 to this issue. Column 4 of the following table lists the action required to remediate the vulnerability in each release, if a solution is available.