Part warning, part question....
My ESXi Hosts were v5.5.0 206190 (straight from the 5.5U2-RollupISO2 cd), I applied the following patches:
ID: ESXi550-201410101-SG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates esx-base
ID: ESXi550-201410401-BG Impact: Critical Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates esx-base
ID: ESXi550-201410402-BG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates misc-drivers
ID: ESXi550-201410403-BG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates sata-ahci
ID: ESXi550-201410404-BG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates xhci-xhci
ID: ESXi550-201410405-BG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates tools-light
ID: ESXi550-201410406-BG Impact: Important Release date: 2014-10-15 Products: embeddedEsx 5.5.0 Updates net-vmxnet3
afterwards they were v5.5.0 2143827
Once upgraded my 2 Citrix Netscaler VPX Appliances (vmware hardware version 8, Citrix Netscaler OS v10.5.52.11nc (latest), FreeBSD 64bit, E1000 Nic) stopped responding on the network. They work fine when on the older 5.5U2 release but start dropping packets intermittently and then ultimately drop off the network when migrated to a host that has the above listed patches. I have 2 in High Availability mode, this occurs even if just one is on and the other off. It goes back to normal when vmotioned back to the pre-patched host.
I've tried switching networks, removing and re-adding nics, upgrading to hardware 10, deleting them all together and deploying the latest version from citrix's website, if it doesn't drop off all together it will drop a lot of packets. You can watch the netscaler console show NODE FAIL, NODE DOWN, and NODE UP events many times a minute.