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It's rude to laugh at other people's misfortunes - even VMware's

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That was one of my mother's regular sayings when I was young. OK Not the bit about VMware. So I didn't laugh when I saw a thread on VMware's community forum entitled BIG bug in ESX 3.5 Update 2 - If you're using 3.5u2 read this now! - A general system error occurred: Internal Error.

Starting this morning, we could not power on nor VMotion any of our Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error "A general system error occurred: Internal Error".
Further digging lead us to messages like this one in /var/log/vmware/hostd.log, and the log file for any virtual machine we tried to power on or VMotion:
Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx| https://msg.License.product.expired This product has expired.

A bit further down another poster comments

Just got off the phone with tech support and they've been inudated by calls about this very problem. It only affects ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Setting the time back a day in ESXi should be ok because if memory serves, VMware Tools will only reset time forward and not backwards.

and at the bottom of the first page of the thread

Dear VMware customers,
We are actively working on rootcausing the problem. Once we know the appropriate action to take here, we’ll provide an update.
Apologies for any inconvenience.
The ESX Product Team

Obviously laughing heartily at this would mean laughing at the Microsoft customers who are also VMware customers. And before poking fun at other people's bugs one should probably think "there, but for the grace of God go any of us" - and avoid getting into what Steve calls the "Your product sucks" , "No! your product sucks" level of debate. Still, any time I hear someone from VM talk about testing, quality assurance or the like I might just smirk and say "August 12th" under my breath.

Technorati Tags: Virtualization,VMware

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    VMware are a competitor and so when things go wrong for them I'll point it out (and to answer Nick, a

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Am descoperit azi cu stupoare, probabil impreuna cu o gramada de alti "fericiti" posesori de VMware ESX

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    When I hear people from Microsoft talking about testing and quality or the like, I might just smirk and say "May 13th", "the second Tuesday of every month" or perhaps just "schadenfreude" under my breath.

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    It's interesting that you mention this as I've been looking at ESXi and Hyper-V on the HP ML115, which is a cheap 64 bit platform using an AMD 1214 with AMD-V capability. I couldn't get ESXi to work with this because it didn't support the inbuilt disk controller. I then installed Server 2008 with Hyper-V and it just works, set up a VM with Server 2003 on it. All I had to do was enable the Secure Virtual Machine Mode in the BIOS. Although, I would be interested to know what the plans are for the bare-metal Hyper-V? Cheers, Vijay

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    hmmm...negative information on VMware?!  My FUD-sense is tingling!

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2008
    Hi James. Thanks for highlighting the VMWare issue in your post and additionally casting doubt on their 'testing, quality assurance and the like'. FUD as defined by Gene Amdahl who coined the phrase is: "the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products". Now... try swapping 'IBM sales people' for 'Microsoft's IT Evangelists' and 'Amdahl products' for 'VMWare products' in the phrase above...

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2008
    cough DST update fiasco: http://www.blkmtn.org/Microsoft-DST-disaster   It's not that it's rude, it's that you hope when such happens to you, they will also understand and have the courtesy to not mock you in return.  In large software environments sometimes things go seriously wrong.   Karma is a serious pain and on the Internet, your posting live forever.