VMware Update Shows No Infrastructure Is Immune to Outage

Our own Scott Ferguson is reporting today on the licensing snafu stemming from the ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 that VMware began shipping on Aug. 1:

VMware released an alert Aug. 12 to warn customers and partners about problems with an update to the 3.5 version of VMware ESX and ESXi virtualization products. The update is causing disruptions and virtual machines are failing to power on. VMware has posted a temporary fix and is working to fix the update.

Three things about this on-premises outage jump to mind:

1. I just missed it. I downloaded this update last Friday, but I hadn't installed it yet on the ESX Server I use for testing in our lab. I've been holding off on upgrading the ESX box from Version 3.0 of the product because the updated version of the Virtual Infrastructure client that the 3.5 release requires regressed on 64-bit Windows compatibility. That regression had since been fixed.

I'm generally a fan of prompt and even automatic updates--after all, when things go wrong with updates, we can always rely on virtualization to snapshot us back into action. Unless, of course, it's your virtualization platform that gets broken. You win this time, partisans of update conservatism.

2. Whether you believe they're necessary or not, mechanisms designed to lock you out of the software running on your hardware are a major pain in the ass.

These things exist solely to enforce the business models of the companies that implement them, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, vendors better make double sure that the features they employ to enforce their licenses remain as transparent as possible to users.

General absence of arbitrary lockout mechanisms: another reason to love open-source software.

3. Catastrophic service outages are not the province of the cloud alone. Looking out at the headlines that Google's been grabbing for its recent Gmail outages, you'd think that no one's self-hosted e-mail or other key services ever went down, or that makers of on-premises software never push down far-reaching failures to their customers.

Unless you're hosting your own services, writing your own platforms, designing your own hardware, running your own network cables and generating your own electricity, you're subject to the potential mistakes of your trusted providers. We must remind ourselves to plan accordingly.

Windows Server, Hourly Edition

For the past several months, anyone who's asked me about the latest big new thing in IT has gotten an earful about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. Building out a Windows Compute Cloud (WC2) service would give Microsoft the opportunity to demonstrate its new server's chops while better serving Windows-reliant customers and channel partners.

Talking Chalk (and Xen Virtualization) with Sun

Today I attended a Sun Microsystems Chalk Talk on the company's virtualization plans. The talk centered on two upcoming products from Sun, which ride together under the anagrammatic label xVM.

The Xen-based xVM will allow companies to choose Solaris without rejecting their existing x86 operating systems. If Sun can team xVM Server with an effective management layer (and xVM Ops Center does look promising), then it can earn the opportunity to win back those who've forgotten about Solaris in favor of the operating system's less mature and arguably less capable Linux and Windows rivals.

Windows Goes Xen, by Proxy

As the slipping ship dates for Microsoft's home-baked hypervisor, Viridian, demonstrate, rolling a new hypervisor is no small task.

Enter Citrix, which followed in a long tradition of making technology bets on Microsoft's behalf by announcing an acquisition of XenSource, the company started by the founders of the Xen project to commercialize the technology.

XenSource President and CEO Peter Levine, summed that focus up well, "Our product focus is to provide the best Microsoft Windows virtualization experience on the market."

Longhorn Falls Short of its Virtual Promise

This week, Microsoft set loose "Longhorn" Server Beta 3, and the release is brimming with evidence of the hard work Microsoft has put into polishing the configuration wizards that work to abstract away the knotty details of the applications and services these interfaces front. Of course, the yellow brick road to the configuration wizard isn't the only or best path to abstracting away complexity. Moving forward, the name of the game in IT abstraction is virtualization, a fact that Microsoft has acknowledged by taking steps to make Longhorn play better both as a guest and a host for server virtualization. Based on this late beta, however, it's looking like Longhorn will fall short on its virtualization promises. Most glaringly, there's the fact that Longhorn is set to ship without the built-in Windows Hypervisor that initially had been slated to bake virtualization right into Windows Server. I think that Microsoft would've...

Was I Too Tough on RHEL?

In my recent review of Red Hat's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its brand-new Xen virtualization features a bit of a hard time with regard to the limitations of its management tools. Relative to the products of VMware, the current market/mind share leader in x86 server virtualization, Red Hat's Xen implementation has a decidedly do-it-yourself nature--less pointing and clicking and more configuration file editing and documentation digging. During an e-mail exchange about the review, a reader challenged me on whether it was fair to criticize RHEL 5's graphical user interface limitations and remarked on his disgust at finding how many tasks in VMware are point-and-click-oriented. Disgust seems to me like a pretty extreme reaction to a software interface, but I think that people chafe at the idea that an inferior product with a newbie-oriented interface--the archetype of which being Windows--might trump an arguably technologically superior option that greets you...

Notes on the Microsoft/Novell Webinar

I missed today's Microsoft and Novell joint webinar, but I cruised over to Novell's website to download the slide deck from the presentation. Perhaps not surprisingly, the slide deck was pretty short on content, but a couple of items caught my eye.  For one thing, there's a slide early on that lays out the sort of heterogeneous network environments that exist in companies today, as defined by a Gartner study. There are seven groups listed in the chart, with different combinations of mainframe, UNIX, Linux, and Windows servers.According to the chart, 40% of firms run a combination of all four sorts of servers, and 24% run a combination of UNIX, Linux and Windows. Every one of the groups listed includes some form of Windows servers, down to the 4% who run Windows only.If you add up the numbers, however, there's 1% that's unaccounted for, so I guess that poor sliver...

Installing Vista RTM on VMware

During our recent Vista tests, we came across a bug in the Vista installer that prevented us from installing the OS onto VMware using an iso image of Vista.  The OS booted normally for us from an iso image, but then complained about not having a driver for the virtual DVD/CD drive from which we'd just booted.The error message that Vista coughs up is, "A required CD/DVD device driver is missing.  If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD or USB flash drive, please insert it now."Here's a workaround, which we pieced together from a handful of VMware web forum posts, and tested with the RTM Vista release and VMware Server 1.0.1.Steps to get Vista installed on VMware Server using an ISO image:1. Configure your Vista VM with two CD drives, the first pointed at a real CD drive, the second pointed at the Vista iso image.  Configure both...

Thoughts on VMware's Virtualization on OS X Demo

Yesterday I dropped by the Four Seasons Hotel to check out VMware's public demo of its in-development virtualization software for OS X. I watched an Intel Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM run Windows XP within OS X, more or less the same way VMware Workstation or Player runs Windows within Windows or within Linux. Performance looked great, including smooth video and Webcam playback from within the virtualized XP instance. What I didn't see, and what eventual users of VMware for OS X may or may not ever end up seeing (at least while remaining in DMCA compliance), is a virtualized OS X running within OS X. In order for this to happen, VMware will have to figure out, to Apple's satisfaction, how to uphold one of Apple's sternest commandments: OS X Shall Not Run on Non-Apple Hardware. There's no doubt that running virtual OS X instances, with all the...