So I had to shut down one of my ESX 3.5 virtual machines today, to remove a virtual NIC that wasn’t necessary anymore. When I went to start it up, I get an internal error. So I look in the logs, and see that ESX is claiming my license has expired. Well, it hasn’t, so off to the VMWare site I go.
Go to the knowledge base site, but it’s down for maintenance. Figures, just when I need it, it’s not working. This should have been an ominous sign, but it didn’t click at the time.
So next I go to the forums, where I find this gem.
Long story short, everyone who’s running the 3.5 U2 version of ESX Server cannot start or VMotion a virtual machine because the licensing bugs out on August 12th. Seriously, August 11th, you’re fine, August 12th, no VMs will power on.
Sounds to me like someone put a literal time bomb in the ESX code. And by the link above, it has blown up quite well.
The workaround isn’t that bad, but this is still quite the black eye for VMWare, which was bought recently by EMC and seems to be suffering from “I’ve been bought by the big multi-corp (EMC, Symantec, MS) and now can’t be quick, nimble, or bug-free anymore because of corporate beaurocracy”.
Hopefully UltraMegaCorp doesn’t feel any pain from this, as they might have some 24/7-type servers that can’t go down.
My $.02 Weed
In-House
UltraMegaCorp makes extensive use of that product, but has been migrating to a Xen-based in-house solution for quite some time. There are no more critical servers run on VMWare, as far as I know.
However, I use the Player extensively in my work; it seems unaffected. Only ESX server seems to have been hit by this time bomb.
That’s pretty big news, though; VMWare ESX Server powers a whole honkin’ huge chunk of corporate America.
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Matthew P. Barnson