PernixData stops working after upgrade to vSphere 5.5 U2 Patch ESXi550-201505002

During a hardware maintenance task I decided to do update my ESXi hosts to the newest available patch. In my case it was patch ESXi550-201505002 which is the replacement for Patch 5 (ESXi550-201504002). After both hosts where updated I saw that PernixData wasn’t working correctly:
My hosts shows that no PernixData Host Extension was installed.
pernix_problem_01 pernix_problem_02
No hosts shows up in the Host Usage overview.
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And there was an Unknown status for the PernixData network.
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I connected to the ESXi hosts through SSH and checked if the service was installed and running.
esxcli software vib list |grep PernixData shows that PernixData 2.5.0.1 was installed.
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I tried to get the status of the Host Extension with /etc/init.d/prnxd status and got this

/opt/pernixdata/bin/prnxd: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.6.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Looks like there was a problem with the libpython library.
I checked the python version of the current host with python -V and it shows version 2.7.8. I checked also a hosts prior patch ESXi550-201505002 and it shows 2.6.8.
Looks like this could be the problem but I need to be sure that this is the problem. I asked a PernixPro mate to check the knowledge base because as of today the knowledge base is only available to registered Partners, Users or PernixPros. He confirmed that there is a python incompatibility issues where the ‘prnxd’ process cannot start.
The following PernixData versions are affected:

  • FVP 2.5.0.0 and 2.5.0.1
  • FVP 2.0.1.0 through 2.0.1.5
  • FVP 2.0.0.0 through 2.0.0.3
  • All FVP 1.5

The update inside patch ESXi550-201505002 was ESXi550-201505101-SG where you can find this line:

Python is updated to version 2.7.8 on ESXi.

PernixData had already fixed this problem in version 2.5.0.2 because the problem was already seen in ESXi 5.1 Patch ESXi510-201503101-SG which was released in March.
For all other PernixData releases there is no update so I would recommend to upgrade/update to the latest version which is 2.5.0.3.
After I installed 2.5.0.3 everything worked again without problems.

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