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Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers

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Today’s a black day for VMware, and also (and maybe especially) VMware customers who upgraded their virtual servers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2. As of this morning, many could not power on VMotion or any of their Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”.

This was first reported by a customer in a thread on VMware Communities. You can find the Knowledge Base article on this problem here.

The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts.

Big oops indeed.

“An issue has been uncovered with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi 3.5 that causes the product license to expire on August 12,” says a statement from VMware’s public relations company in response to press inquiries. “VMware is alerting customers and partners of this issue. Updated product bits with correct licensing will be made available for download as soon as possible. VMware regrets any inconvenience to customers. VMware is working on an immediate patch for customers in production. VMware expects to fix the issue in code in the next 36 hours once QA testing has been completed,” the statement concludes.

A work-around has been offered whereby customers should manually set the date of all ESX 3.5u2 hosts back to 10 August as a temporary fix. Brian Madden has more on the actual glitch and the workaround, as does Matthew Marlowe.

It looks like ESXi 3.5 and even some versions of Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1 with some patches have been affected. New downloads of all affected products has been disabled, and according to VMware patched products will be made available starting tomorrow.

This will hurt VMware in any event, even if we don’t really know how many customers have already downloaded Update 2, and how many of those were using it in a live environment.

VMware

VMWare Joins the Linux Foundation

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The Linux Foundation announced that VMware has become a Silver member of the Foundation,

According to their site , The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the LF sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux

VMware’s participation in the Linux community includes the contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a paravirtualization interface as an open specification, and subsequent collaboration with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of a source-level paravirtualization interface (paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel

According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Linux is a natural platform for virtualization and cloud computing. VMware is obviously a leader in that field and a leading ISV who has embraced the Linux platform,”

Over at the Open Road , Matt Assay responds with questions around the alleged GPL violations VMWare still has to resolve.

In VentureCake’s the VMWare House Of Cards there is a lengthy discussion is about whether vmkernel, a proprietary blob that can only be loaded by a Linux kernel, can be considered a derived work of Linux.

It’s not a new discussion but hopefully with VMWare joining the Linux Foundation it’s one that will end soon , with clarity, and License compliance. Ass Matt notes

VMware can’t hope to cozy up to Linux and its community without participating on the
principles of transparency and trust. At present, it has shown little of the former
and has yet to earn much of the latter

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Veeam Releases Monitor 3.0 Beta

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After releasing Backup 2.0 last week, Veeam has now announced that Veeam Monitor version 3.0 is now available in beta.  Its new features, detailed below, increase the product’s trend analysis and troubleshooting capabilities – equipping IT admins to proactively manage the performance and availability of their VMware infrastructure.

New features in Veeam Monitor 3.0 include:

  • Enterprise scalability and support for multiple VirtualCenters. Is your environment getting too large to be handled by a single VirtualCenter? Veeam Monitor can help. New performance optimization and a special monitoring mode allow for enterprise scalability and provide the ability to gather monitoring information from large VI deployments with multiple VirtualCenters – all from a single console.
  • Multiple new alarm sources. The following new alarm sources are available in Veeam Monitor version 3.0 for even more comprehensive monitoring and alerting:
  • Alarm modeling. No more being flooded with alerts, and no more waiting for weeks to find out that your alarm settings don’t work as intended. With Veeam Monitor 3.0, you can model and test your alarms instantly. Simply use the new Alarm Modeling feature to test your alarm settings against your event history from VirtualCenter for an immediate evaluation. The new Alarm Modeling feature allows you to easily establish better benchmarks and thresholds. Based on the modeling results, you can fine-tune the alarms in case it appears that you will receive too many false positive alarms, or missing something important.
  • Capacity planning and trend analysis. Veeam Monitor’s new Trend Reporting feature allows you to discover trends and do proactive capacity planning. Project how your virtual environment will grow over time; find out how resource usage is changing for a specified host, resource pool or datacenter; and plan upgrades or migrations based on what you learn.
  • Correlation of VI events and performance data. Ever wondered about an unexpected resource consumption spike? Solve resource usage mysteries with new real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graph.
  • Suppression of unwanted alarms. Tired of being slammed with alarms during backup activities? You can now instruct Veeam Monitor to suppress alerts raised during known VI activities, such as backup or snapshot operations.
  • Drill-down into VM. Want to research possible rogue VM activity? Veeam Monitor 3.0 provides you with the ability to drill down to an individual VM and find out what processes are running there, and how much CPU and memory they are consuming.
  • Connect to a VM directly from Veeam Monitor. Need to troubleshoot a VM that is not behaving as expected according to performance metrics? For your convenience, the Monitor 3.0 user interface features a new “Console” tab, which lets you connect to the VM console right from the Monitor interface.
  • Leverage VC history. No more waiting for monitoring data to be gathered before you can start working on it. When you connect to VirtualCenter for the first time, Veeam Monitor 3.0 fetches all historical performance and event data from it, giving you the ability to browse and analyze historical data immediately.

You can download the Beta of Veeam Monitor 3.0 here.

Veeam

VMLogix Also Sells a Lab Manager, Releases Version 3.6

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VMLogix has released VMLogix LabManager 3.6 – not to be confused with VMware Lab Manager 3.0, released on the same day – carrying support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. VMLogix LabManager is hypervisor agnostic and with the introduction of Hyper-V now supports all standard server virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager enables software companies, SMBs and enterprise IT organizations to leverage virtualization to consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. VMLogix LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager 3.6 is available starting today and includes the beta version of support for the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. The product will be generally available in September 2008.

VMLogix

VMware Announces Lab Manager 3

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, a lab automation solution that provides software development and QA engineers with self-service provisioning of multi-VM environments while giving IT departments increased control over policies. With this new release, VMware Lab Manager now offers support for multiple organizational units, advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with the highest quality of service. Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

The tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 allows lab administrators to take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are more resilient against hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

VMware Lab Manager is list priced at $1,295 per processor and is available for purchase through VMware’s global network of distributors, resellers and OEMs starting August 7, 2008. There’s a free download available on the VMware website.

VMware

Release: VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2

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VMware introduced their latest Beta build of their Apple Mac virtualization product, VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2, nearly three months after releasing the Beta 1 build. The new release is focused on several key areas, mainly to improve the user experience with updated video, data protection and Unity capabilities.

VMware Fusion 2.0 will be made available free to owners of VMware Fusion 1.x.

A rundown of the new features:

  • Multiple Snapshots
    • Save your virtual machine in any number of states, and return to those states at any time
    • Automatically take snapshots at regular intervals with AutoProtect
  • File and URL Sharing
    • Share applications between your Mac and your virtual machines
    • Finder can now open your Mac’s files directly in Windows applications like Microsoft Word and Windows Media Player
    • VMware Fusion can configure virtual machines to open their files in Mac applications like Preview and iTunes
    • Click on a URL in a virtual machine and open it in your favorite Mac browser, or configure your Mac to open its links in a virtual machine
    • Map key folders in Windows Vista and Windows XP (Desktop, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures) to their corresponding Mac folders (Desktop, Documents, Music, and Pictures)
    • Greatly improved reliability of shared folders—now compatible with Microsoft Office and Visual Studio
  • Experimental Support for Mac OS X Server Virtual Machines
    • You can create Mac OS X Server 10.5 virtual machines (experimental support). Due to Apple licensing restrictions, the standard edition of Mac OS X 10.5 is not supported in a virtual machine
  • Display Improvement
    • Improved 3D support
    • Use 1080p full high definition video in Windows XP or Windows Vista
    • Freely resize your virtual machine?s window and enter and exit Full Screen view while playing games
    • Run Linux applications directly on your Mac?s desktop under Unity view
  • UI Improvements
    • The New Virtual Machine Assistant has Linux Easy Install in addition to Windows Easy Install
    • Cut and paste files up to 4 MB, including graphics and styled text
    • Status icons glow when there is activity
    • A screen shot of the last suspended state of a virtual machine is displayed in Quick Look and Cover Flow
    • You can remap keyboard and mouse input
    • Keyboard compatibility between the Mac and the virtual machine is improved
    • The vmrun command line interface is available for scripting
  • Broader Hardware and Software Support
    • VMware Fusion supports Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
    • VMware Fusion supports 64-bit Vista Boot Camp; handles activation for Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007
    • Experimental support for 4-way SMP (note: Windows Vista and Windows XP limit themselves to two CPUs)
  • Support for Virtual Hard Disks
    • You can mount the virtual disk of a powered-off Windows virtual machine using VMDKMounter (Mac OS X 10.5 or higher)
    • You now have the ability to resize virtual disks

Here’s a demo video the VMware team put out:

VMware

[Source: VMBlog]