Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Foobar for VMWare - Why can't I start my virtual servers today?

Hey everybody,
I am now done and dusted with those 2 subjects for my Uni degree, and I now only have one left –
On wireless technologies. I’ve got 3 weeks off on holidays, so I’m going to get some R&R, plus I need to start thinking about upgrading my MCSE certs to MCITP Enterprise (for Windows Server 2008).

I was going to be blogging about Windows Server 2008 today, but the big news today is VMWare are in the headlines for the wrong reasons. Apparently if you have the latest version of ESX (3.5.x Update 2) you will be unable to boot your virtual servers up today (the 13th Aug) or ever after until a fix is released.

See the official Knowledge Base Article here:
http://kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html

Nothing has been said about what happens to virtual servers already running (presumably nothing will happen until you try and reboot your virtual servers), however VMWare have announced a licensing bug where the software cripples itself on the 12th August 2008 (presumably this functionality was supposed to be for the demo version, and should have been un-locked as part of the registration process).

The immediate workaround that VMWare have announced is just to roll back the hosts system date and time (not that it’s much of a work-around), but I’d say a patch will be coming out within the next few hours to correct this problem.

Anyway – That’s it from me for the minute – I’m currently building up a really nice HP ProLiant DL580 G5 server with Windows 2008 for one of our production servers, so I’ll be back in the next few days with my experiences from that.

Cheers,
Phil