VMware foul-up causes premature licence expiry

Stephen Withers
Monday, 18 August 2008 07:50

Business IT - Technology

An embarrassing blunder has forced VMware to issue a second version of ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 to fix a bug that caused licences to incorrectly expire. The problem arose because a time limitation from a beta version of the virtualisation software was incorrectly left in the code that was shipped.

ESX is VWware's "bare metal" hypervisor that partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines, each running a separate operating system. ESXi is a free version that does not include the service console, and therefore requires external management tools.

CEO Paul Maritx apologised to customers, saying "We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

"VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.

"We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes."

Symptoms included the error messages "This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine's date and time are set correctly" when trying to power on a virtual machine, or "A General System error occurred: Internal error" when trying to deploy a virtual machine.

VMware has released new versions of ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 2, along with 'express patches' that can be applied to original builds that are already installed.

But there may be "challenges" to be faced when installing the patches - please read on .