VMWare showed last month that it was readying for a battle with Microsoft by ousting its founder and CEO Diane Greene, and replacing her with ex-Microsoft Vice President of Platform Strategy and Developer Group Paul Maritz. The news sent the shares tumbling by 28% and the company gave no public reason for the move although it seems likely that they wanted an ex-Microsoft VP in charge in order to better fight a potentially bloody fight with Microsoft over the virtualisation market.
Shortly after the move, VMWare announced that their new virtualisation product ESXi would be available for free. VMWare ESXi is the thin hyper-visor based virtualisation product which, unlike ESX or Microsoft’s current Hyper-V product, doesn’t require to be installed on top of an operating system. The move was clearly to up competition with Microsoft (who is effectively giving Hyper-V away Server 2008) and increase VMWare’s installed base, while still earning revenue from support and enterprise management products.
However the aggressive move stuttered today as VMWare admitted to a serious bug which prevents shutdown virtual machines from powering on or using VMotion on or after August 12th. The problem is caused by the licensing software in ESX 3.5 Update 2 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and VMWare advises users not to shutdown virtual guests or to set the date back on the host. VMWare have yet to commit to a release of a patch and their workaround is not usually possible in an enterprise environment when systems require synchronised times for legal, regulatory or security auditing.
Yesterday VMWare were proud to announce that they had the best virtualisation product for Windows administrators. I wonder what those same administrators think today? Read more on the serious bug on the VMWare forum.
UPDATE: VMWare have now released an apology and an express patch to fix the problem.
