Timebomb!
Everyone knows about it! Vmware’s Upadte 2 was a massive disaster. My favourtie response out of Vmware was “just set your clock back before August 12th!” Nice solution.
The problem is that VMware appears to have neglected to remove the timebomb, that is software that stops a product from running on a specific date and time, from its VMware’s ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2) software when the company transitioned the software from beta test to the released product. This meant that when the system clock stuck 12:00 AM on August 12th, the license expired. So, virtual machines running on these hypervisors could not be powered on when they were turned off, awakened when they were suspended or moved from one machine to another using VMware’s Vmotion technology.
However, is it too late now that the damage has been done? Vmware Australia has played down the imapct of this bug. Having talked to a number of clients last week, I can tell you that the impact on all of them was quite significant. Change management processes or not, it’s just not good business practice.
The other “co-incidence”? This happens shortly after Diane Greene leaves as CEO and ex-Microsoft executive Paul Maritz takes over …
Posted on August 18th, 2008 | By: Adam | Tags: bug, update, VMWare
Filed under VMWare
