The February updates to Windows Server 2022 … Break Windows Server 2022

Posted on Saturday, Feb 25, 2023 by Chris Hayner

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

One day I’m gonna compile a list of Patch Tuesdays that cause catastrophic failures in enterprise critical deployments of Windows. I’m not gonna count the total NUMBER of catastrophic failures, because that number is probably nearing infinity.

Just the number of days where this allegedly routine and tested patch bundle comes out, is loyally applied by dedicated sysadmins, and then shit melts down. That number is also probably quite high. Honestly the number of failure days might be equal to the number of Patch Tuesdays. Wait, why does that all sound so familiar? ANYWAY.

This time. KB5022842 was released and might cause guest VMs running on ESXi 6.7 or 7.0 to “not start up.” The damage appears to only affect systems that are using the Secure Boot option in VMWare which, who cares about security right?

If you’ve already installed the patch, even uninstalling it won’t undo the damage. You’ll have to either run without Secure Boot, or update to ESXi 8. Nice one, chaps.

I guess the ONE person that Microsoft has left in their organization running VMWare was on vacation that day? Not like ESXi is a major platform used by millions of customers or anything.. why bother to test it? We’ve got an AI-enabled chat platform to launch!