I had two customers asking today what happened to ESXi 6.5 build 7526125. They downloaded patches and installed them in their test environment. Ready to patch some of their clusters they did a validation and found out that the patch (ESXi650-201801001.zip) has disappeared from the face of the earth. This patch included microcode for Intel processors, and Intel informed VMware that there was potentially an issue with their microcode. As such VMware decided to pull the patch as noted in the KB article. Those who had already downloaded the patches and are manually updating, make sure to delete these. Those who use VUM, make sure to exclude them from your baseline as mentioned in the KB:
Any baseline (including VMware Pre-defined Baseline), that includes one or more of the bulletins that correspond to patch VMSA-2018-0004, would experience the above listed error and hence, will not be able to proceed with the remediation process. For such customers, it is recommended to create dynamic or static baseline excluding the bulletins ESXi650-201801401-BG, ESXi650-201801402-BG, ESXi600-201801401-BG, ESXi600-201801402-BG ,ESXi550-201801401-BG and continue with the remediation process. For more information on Create and Edit Patch or Extension Baselines see vSphere 6.5 document.
Normally I don’t share these types of things anymore, but as I had two people asking on the same day I figured I would as it seems not everyone had seen that the patches were pulled and replaced. If you haven’t downloaded the patches yet, or haven’t patched your systems but want to, read this advisory first and use the patches mentioned it.