Massive VMware Bug Shuts Systems Down

mattmarlowe writes "Imagine if Red Hat released a version of Linux, and after it was deployed, customers noticed that any processes with a start date of today would refuse to run? Well, that's what happened to VMware — a company that wants nearly all server applications running in virtual machines within a matter of years." Supposedly a fix will be available ... in 36 hours.

Comments

License Management Software!?

[bigtallmofo]

I don't get license management measures in software that is only going to be used by major corporations.

If someone wants to run virtual machines at home or in a small business, they're likely going to be more than satisfied with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX) and wouldn't even consider the much more complex ESX.

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software. Hardware dongles, software license managers and the like only hurt your paying customers.

Re:License Management Software!?

[db32]

Exactly. It is a tremendous pain in the ass to track all the stupid license keys and crap in use. Departments frequently need software specific to only their department and outside the scope of normal IT support stuff. Phone numbers, licenses, etc. God forbid any of those companies get purchased or go under, then you are stuck with expensive software that you cannot recover.

The call home variety is extremely infuriating. On top of whatever nonsense key/activation crap you have to go through, you have to put up with it trying to call home or deactivating itself. MS isn't the only guilty party in this, but those bastards certainly made the situation much worse.

Re:License Management Software!?

[morgan_greywolf]

Exactly. Most large companies usually have an entire person, and sometimes multiple people dedicated to nothing but license management.

What a colossal waste of money.

Re:License Management Software!?

[shawn(at)fsu]

I really don't think the fines would keep large corporations in line. look at all the stuff you see big business doing that they know is illegal and that they know will land them big fines if they get caught. Software piracy is no different. In fact it's probably easier to use a pirated piece of software than it is to dump illegal chemicals or defraud investors. You can manage the exposer.

Re:License Management Software!?

[rudeboy1]

Good god do I hear you, brother. I work IT for a legal firm. So many little apps no one else in IT has ever even heard of. And most of them, you're talking to the same guy for support that developed it, and filled the sales order. Out of his basement or garage. Multi-million dollar a year law firm, and it can be brought to its knees if one of our obscure applications goes down and needs support, and the one guy that can support it is out taking his kids to soccer practice.

I'm looking at you North Winds Software. I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing. If you answered the phone.

I need to go back to bed. :(

Re:License Management Software!?

[_merlin]

Having administered ESX, I can say the license management is useful for one thing: it helps you ensure you aren't exceeding what you're licensed for. For example, if you aren't licensed for multi-processor boxes, it will complain until you get a valid license. If nothing else, it gives you some confidence that you will pass an audit.

License management is also useful for things like MATLAB and OPNET that are licensed per concurrent user: you can install on as many machines as you like, but they need to be able to talk to your license server (not that this is _your_ license server on your network - it isn't "calling home") to ensure that the number of concurrent users is below the maximum allowed. That way, if say, everyone needs to be able to run OPNET occasionally, but not very often, everyone can install it, but you only need to pay for a few licenses. You know you aren't exceeding your licenses because it won't let you launch more instances than you're allowed simultaneously. If your users regularly complain that they can't fire up OPNET due to lack of licenses, you pay for a few more seats.

On the other hand, I can't stand software that calls home to ensure that it's "genuine" a la Windows Vista, or those stupid CD copy protection schemes. That's bullshit. Things like that make more work for a sysadmin, not less. I only like license management when it helps me, the admin; I don't care what it does or doesn't do for the software vendor. I'm a selfish pig, I know.

Another thing I can't stand is things like Rational Purify where they attempt to count your "activations" at their end: when you install Purify, it increases the installed count in IBM's system, and decreases it when you uninstall. If the IBM server thinks you're using all your licenses, you can't install. Too bad people always forget to uninstall Purify before wiping their computers for a clean OS install (or scrapping the computers)! And don't get me started on how bad it is to deal with IBM's phone support. This is one copy protection scheme that I do bypass: I install Purify in a VMware virtual machine, snapshot it, uninstall Purify, and roll the virtual machine back to the snapshot. That way, Purify will work in the virtual machine, but IBM's servers will think I haven't used any of my licenses. Also, I can make copies of the virtual machine for multiple people to use. It's easier for me to track the licences than put up with a crap license management scheme.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Cyberax]

LARGE corporations usually just buy site licenses. It's easier for them this way.

Re:License Management Software!?

[supersnail]

Actually its quite a common policy in MegaCorps to reject software that require machine specific or expiring license keys for use in "Mission Critical" applications.

The backup server not having the correct licenses is one of the biggest risks in a Disaster Recovery.

Migration to newer better hardware also becomes a nightmare where license keys are involved -- what do you mean the new server doesnt have centronics port for the dongle?

Its also screws up the companys virtualisation strategy as you have no idea whether a given license scheme will work in inside a VM or not.

Do like the Fortune 500 and just say no to runtime licenses.
       

Re:License Management Software!?

[John Hasler]

> Software piracy is no different.

Yes it is. The returns are miniscule.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Gordonjcp]

I'm looking at you North Winds Software. I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing. If you answered the phone.

There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Bert64]

It's a typical case of companies shooting themselves in the foot.
Freely available software is already compelling enough and gradually taking over many markets, adding additional artificial costs just serves to make the free/oss option even more attractive.

Re:License Management Software!?

[kungfugleek]

Maybe it's easier to get away with dumping chemicals and defrauding investors because of the numbers and motives of the people involved:

• Defrauding investors only involves the highest level executives, and they keep that kind of thing pretty secret.
• Dumping chemicals isn't watched as carefully as Windows licenses (for an example) and I doubt the ones who order it or the ones doing it are motivated to talk about it.

In the case of pirated software, especially something widely used in the company, there would be a lot of eyes (the software vendor watching like a hawk), and a lot of support calls attracting attention from said vendor. Piracy probably happens more on small scales though, where, like you said, you can manage the exposure.

Re:License Management Software!?

[afabbro]

I really don't think the fines would keep large corporations in line.

And yet, it does. Of all the Fortune 500 companies in which I've worked, I never saw any piracy. The risk/reward is too out of whack for big companies to consider it. Sure, you get some guy in the PC support department who burns himself a copy of Microsoft Office for home or something - that is unavoidable - but I never saw any piracy in companies.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That way, Purify will work in the virtual machine, but IBM's servers will think I haven't used any of my licenses. Also, I can make copies of the virtual machine for multiple people to use. It's easier for me to track the licences than put up with a crap license management scheme.

Maybe you should have posted anonymously...

Re:License Management Software!?

[Bert64]

But then if your license server is down the software won't run, creating an artificial and unnecessary dependency. Similarly if people leave it running they can denial of service other users.

Plus you have the additional unnecessary cost of the license server, the hardware it runs on, the os it runs on (assuming its not free), the power it consumes and the time required to keep it running and updated.

License management doesn't help you, it hinders you... If you use software where the license says you can install it on as many machines as you want and use as many instances as you like, you don't need to worry... You can install it on as many systems as you want, with as many processors as you want, without any artificial restrictions and without having to do any nasty hacks.

The same can be said of pirate software, it typically has all these onerous schemes hacked out, making it a better proposition than the original.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Jim_Maryland]

While I can see your point, I can say that my employer (over 10,000 employees) does use tools to monitor what is installed on their network. They do, as another reply suggested, frequently opt for enterprise licenses for typical software and tend to limit access to computers so users can't install any software. Those that have access are required to acknowledge a policy that states they won't download/install software without prior approval too. Now I don't know if this is typical for all large companies, but it does match what I saw at my 3 previous employers (ranging from about 300 employees to 800 employees). The smaller companies I was with were just less sophisticated (no tools, but random audits) about monitoring the systems. They all had policies in place though that said "users can't install unapproved software".

Re:License Management Software!?

[camcorder]

Not only easier, but also they don't care about expense which is shown as 'investment' on their balance sheet. Big companies are already profitable bussinesses and instead of paying more tax to government they tend to buy expensive 'site' licenses even though they actually don't need it.

Re:License Management Software!?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

It's the average corporation's sociopathic assessment of crime: if the opportunity costs outweigh the benefits, then they don't do it. Otherwise, they go for it. Software piracy may be a small offence compared with illegal dumping, but it can potentially be extremely costly for the amount of money it saves. Look at the RIAA for crying out loud.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true. I had to implement a licensing system for software only going to some big companies, and my number one priority was to make sure it wouldn't get in their way. So it felt quite pointless.

However, if you have no licensing enforcement mechanism, how do your customers even know if they are in violation? As you said, these big companies want to be in compliance of licensing terms, but they can't be expected to consult their legal department every time some software is run to ensure they are in compliance. So, in that sense, that hardware dongle is an easy way for customer to know that they are operating within the terms of the software license. It might suck for the guy actually using the software, but it's probably good for the company he is working for.

Re:License Management Software!?

[db32]

There is a WIDE WIDE range of things that don't exist in the F/OSS world yet. The killer problem seems to be inherent in the way F/OSS works. Industry specific things frequently don't happen unless people from that industry also happen to be coders. Outside of the inherent difficulty in writing software for an industry you don't understand, most geeks don't bother to learn about other industries and instead assume that they should all operate the same way IT does.

Re:License Management Software!?

[jandrese]

Of course it's the site license system that came around and bit VMWare in the ass here.

Re:License Management Software!?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Dumping Chemicals - If the fines are less than what you are saving ... then keep dumping ...

Re:License Management Software!?

[emag]

But then if your license server is down the software won't run, creating an artificial and unnecessary dependency. Similarly if people leave it running they can denial of service other users.

I'm pretty sure that, at least in the *nix world of license servers, they're already capable of clustering. ie, you have 2-3 license servers that talk to each other, and if 1 goes down, the other 2 continue serving up licenses.

Not that we're actually doing this with our license servers, but at least FlexLM (and Nagios' FlexLM monitor) seem to think it's possible to do.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Courageous]

Actually its quite a common policy in MegaCorps to reject software that require machine specific or expiring license keys for use in "Mission Critical" applications.

--------------

Yes. I usually tell our enterprise software sales people: 1) how much we intend to pay for their software, 2) the manner in which we will accept licensing.

If they won't play ball on either front, usually I'm looking somewhere else.

Doesn't always work, though. Take VMWare, for instance. _Bastards_. :-)

Re:License Management Software!?

[drachenstern]

The more important variant of that question is does the parent want to share enough of the details of operation (clean room style) to get someone to want to write an OS equiv.

Don't misunderstand me, I like to write code, but if I don't know what the hole looks like, I can't carve a peg to fit it...

Re:License Management Software!?

[swabeui]

I'm looking at you North Winds Software. I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing. If you answered the phone.

North Winds Software? Just a WILD guess... is this 'software' based on MS Access? I wonder where they got the company name from...

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which will help his support problems in what way? It's not about the software, its about the service and support, and most OSS short of the operating system has zero support outside of newsgroups.

Re:License Management Software!?

[agbinfo]

However, if you have no licensing enforcement mechanism, how do your customers even know if they are in violation? As you said, these big companies want to be in compliance of licensing terms, but they can't be expected to consult their legal department every time some software is run to ensure they are in compliance. So, in that sense, that hardware dongle is an easy way for customer to know that they are operating within the terms of the software license. It might suck for the guy actually using the software, but it's probably good for the company he is working for.

Why not use log files. You log when someone uses the application, when they are idle and when they exit the application. This gives you enough information to know if you are conforming to the license and you can have a contract that let's the seller audit the log files in some circumstances.

Benefits:

• The licensee can look at the log file to make sure they are in compliance.
• The application can keep working if the log server is down.
• The licensor can verify that a company is in compliance.
• No dongle or other hardware required.
• Bugs in the license server code won't bring down your organization.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone wants to run virtual machines at home or in a small business, they're likely going to be more than satisfied with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX) and wouldn't even consider the much more complex ESX.

I'm actually rebuilding an old Poweredge 1600sc (which I got for free) specifically to run ESX at home. The day they released a bare metal hypervisor free to the community was the day I was finally able to get rid of my tons of desktops, conserve power, conserve space, etc.

ESX may be complex, but for some of us, it fits the bill nicely for a home machine.

Re:License Management Software!?

[aix tom]

I would count those software using "license servers" that check on startup and then deny startup of the application into the "license enforcement" category, not in the "license management" category.

On the other hand, we have one special software that doesn't enforce any license checks during runtime, but offers a "license audit" tool that outputs your concurrent users, maximum users, etc.. during a specific time period. That way you can check easily if you have enough licenses every now and then. And there is a condition in the license agreement that you have to check at least once a year. That is acceptable in my opinion.

Then as a bad example we have this other software that is a pain in the ass to get to run because they needs a hardware ID to get it to run. Thankfully we were able to fake that hardware ID in VMWare. Because it wouldn't fit in our disaster recovery otherwise.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://www.northwind-inc.com/pages/about-us.php:

-> Woman-owned, small disadvantaged business

Hmm...I would say so. Btw, I'm just kidding.

What is a "disadvantaged business" anyway, and why would someone actually use that as a sales point?

Re:License Management Software!?

[greed]

FLEXlm runs on more than just UNIX, and can be run as either a single node or a set of three for redundancy (and load-share, IIRC). And you can load multiple vendor daemons into the same FLEXlm server daemon. (And I think I mean FLEXnet and not FLEXlm 'cause the bastards at Macrovision renamed it to leverage their value-add proposition on a diverse networkological paradigm in a going-forward... never mind.)

It has the advantage that most UNIX admins who have dealt with it will know how to deal with it for other products that use it. It has a massive _disadvantage_ that the vendor must provide a daemon for you. So we can't move our licenses from Solaris to Linux because Sun doesn't have a daemon for their old compiler (that we use for our old product when someone waves a really large cheque and wants a patch). Same with other licenses for either "we don't do Linux" or "we've gone bankrupt".

It's still a pain in the ass, but it's a known and predictable pain.

Oh, and I've never bothered getting the 3-node redundant thing working. That would require, oh, a budget and room for the extra 2 machines....

Re:License Management Software!?

[fr175]

I really don't think the fines would keep large corporations in line. look at all the stuff you see big business doing that they know is illegal and that they know will land them big fines if they get caught. Software piracy is no different. In fact it's probably easier to use a pirated piece of software than it is to dump illegal chemicals or defraud investors. You can manage the exposer.

Having acted in an advising capacity on a software license management project currently underway at one of the worlds largest financial institutions (400k employees), I disagree. Purchased software is an asset on the books and needs to be tracked. Pirated software is a risk and even the largest companies will occasionally be brought to court for "over implementation."

The main hurdle with Software Asset Management (SAM) is the complexity of the licenses involved, and the multitude of way in which it can be obtained. Some examples: is the license perpetual or subscription based; is it a "named user" license or is it assigned to the org; does it include maintenance (upgrade rights); if it includes maintenance is the maint co-termed with the other licenses that the org owns; if it includes maintenance, what was the most current version at the time the maintenance expired; does the current version allow for "downgrades" and how many version prior can be downgraded; what previous versions qualify for an upgrade license and which would need a full new version; can the licenses be transferred within the org; can they be transferred globally; does the license allow for home use; does the license allow for portable device use; just to name a few.

If large corporations were willing pirates, you would not see them making their annual multi-million dollar payments to Microsoft for their Enterprise Agreements. You wouldn't see them spending millions on risk management/mitigation consultants or conducting their own software audits. There are people out there getting paid piles of cash to implement a working SAM system.

It's unavoidable that a large corporation will be under-licensed. However, they spend big bucks to mitigate the risk that this opens them up to.

Re:License Management Software!?

[jimicus]

There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?

I can answer that one for you already.

1. There may or may not be an F/OSS equivalent. But data migration is probably going to be extremely painful, and as far as everyone else in the business is concerned, any failings in the product is the IT department's problem not theirs. So the rest of the business isn't too keen on migration.

2. If it's a business application which does one of the myriad boring things which are necessary in most businesses but tend to be specific to the field, the answer to "is there a F/OSS equivalent?" is almost certainly "no".

Re:License Management Software!?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

But then if your license server is down the software won't run, creating an artificial and unnecessary dependency. Similarly if people leave it running they can denial of service other users.

Plus you have the additional unnecessary cost of the license server, the hardware it runs on, the os it runs on (assuming its not free), the power it consumes and the time required to keep it running and updated.

For the type of companies that run these types of license servers, the associated costs are in the noise level. Besides, the money saved by purchasing floating licenses, more than makes up for the additional server...

As for the rest of your comment, the types of programs that require these license servers are expensive and have a per seat charge. Piracy isn't much of a concern, since their client base would be foolish to risk the penalties.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That audit log is good... for an audit :) But, you do also want to prevent them from violating licensing terms as much as possible. Just telling customers they violated licensing after the fact isn't enabling them to follow their own policies. I think the main thing to address for those kinds of customers is that if they absolutely have to do something without being licensed, then you have to give them some way to do it. You don't want to bring them completely to a halt because a hardware key broke or something. As long as that's the case, then a licensing bug shouldn't be fatal for the customers productivity.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I love how people use sensationalism to make things sound worse than they are.

I think "[m]ost large companies" can spare "an entire person" (as opposed to a fraction of a person?) or even "multiple people".

Also, do you have first-hand knowledge of most large companies' licensing operations? Just a thought.

Re:License Management Software!?

[alohatiger]

What is a "disadvantaged business" anyway, and why would someone actually use that as a sales point?

Government work. Some government contracts require a percentage of the work to be done by minority/women/veteran/disadvantaged owned businesses.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Just Some Guy]

Having administered ESX, I can say the license management is useful for one thing: it helps you ensure you aren't exceeding what you're licensed for. For example, if you aren't licensed for multi-processor boxes, it will complain until you get a valid license.

The fact that people think crap like that is normal, and even helpful, is why I'm a Free Software pragmatist.

Re:License Management Software!?

[nortcele]

Amen. I would like to wrap an old mouse cord around the neck of every vendor that uses yearly licensing with keys. It seems to be the method of choice to leverage companies when licensing comes due. I understand and agree with a specific number of floating seats license and running a license server. But yearly? Come on.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you mean. As a FS/OS fan I regularly write tools and GUIs for complex legal patent systems. Or take the firmware I developed and open sourced for my home brew nanotech vascular cleansing and heart repair nonobot OS.

It's not like I need decades of mutually exclusive experience in those industries beyond my own CS knowledge and there's certainly no licensing requirments which might make it phrohibitively expensive in terms of liability... :p

Re:License Management Software!?

[zippthorne]

Is that the software company? How would a software company even have a "lost time accident" anyway?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

So because the RIAA uses unethical practices, the average corporation also uses illegal or unethical practices?

Didn't think so...

Re:License Management Software!?

[repvik]

Still won't solve the problem of support though

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

We run ESX on a bunch of hardware. All the licenses are paid for yet I still (with tacit approval) install cracks to avoid licensing issues. Sad that today our legitimately licensed stuff is still running while those who are too scared to take control are SOL.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Skjellifetti]

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software.

Not true. I worked for a smallish software companies that had their software replicated in at least one large customer installation well beyond the number of seats that were actually paid for. When confronted, the reaction was "so sue us..." We eventually settled for about 1/10 of what we would have made if they had obeyed the license terms because the cost of litigation coupled with the delay tactics they could have used would have meant that we would be out of business long before the court case was over. Size just means that they have more resources to defend their slimy actions.

Re:License Management Software!?

[beckerist]

Understandably extremely specialized software might not be worth writing (entering a niche market with no income is business suicide) but if the software is general enough, usually a good tour of the interface is enough to get a project kickstarted.

I'm sure the devs didn't need to see the source to Winamp* before writing XMMS**.

*[insert proprietary software here]
**[insert open source equivalent here]

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get license management measures in software that is only going to be used by major corporations.

I read an annual report from ARM, who design and license professor IP. Part of that year's income was from tightening up licensing - that is, customers who in previous years had used more copies of the design than they had paid for.

Was this intentional? Probably not. It's just that spending money on employees to find out whether they should be giving more money to their suppliers, was not a priority.

Look at it like this: People on slashdot say license keys and license servers and putting CDs in drives are such an inconvenience and so much work - but they will meticulously track every license, software installation and upgrade on every computer?

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software. Hardware dongles, software license managers and the like only hurt your paying customers.

If you BSA audit your customers they will be very unhappy. Running a centralised licensing server will make them only somewhat unhappy.

Re:License Management Software!?

[tsstahl]

I'm looking at you North Winds Software. I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing. If you answered the phone.

Um, isn't North Winds the name of the company that comes with the sample Access database? They're not real, you know... ;)

Re:License Management Software!?

[grub]

Mathworks (makers of Matlab) are incorporating some type of call-home function. That's one reason we're saying "ENOUGH" and installing Octave on new machines. We pay Mathworks buckets of money and they clamp down harder on us.

Re:License Management Software!?

[billcopc]

Why don't you email IBM and ask them to do it ?

They're the ones accusing the open-source movement of not having enough obscure single-digit-user-base apps.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

but having the source is half the battle.....

Re:License Management Software!?

[ArsonSmith]

The way VMWare is suppose to work, if the License Server can't be reached all licensed products will continue to function for 30 days. If you can't fix the license server by then you have other issues. (such as this bug)

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a tremendous pain in the ass to track all the stupid license keys and crap in use.

If it's a pain in the ass to keep track of license keys, wouldn't you also consider it a pain in the ass to keep track of numbers of installations?

You can't put together a spreadsheet saying "Office XP license key asdf-asdf-asdf" but you would put together one saying "Office XP licenses: 40 seats purchased, 35 installs" and keep it up to date?

Re:License Management Software!?

[ArsonSmith]

But look at the complexities of the BSD and GPL and LGPL and MPL and TLA and SCO licenses in the open source world. You'd need like 8 people full time payed lawyers to figure out that crap. Give me good ole standardized Corporate proprietary license any day.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Oswald]

A very wise soul once said, "Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action."

Re:License Management Software!?

[alexborges]

simply not true, my friend. Commercial Distros support all the sw they provide and that's much more than the os.

Re:License Management Software!?

[MBGMorden]

and as far as everyone else in the business is concerned, any failings in the product is the IT department's problem not theirs

This is true, and particularly frustrating. We recently have converted from an (old, but very functional and stable) 20+ year old COBOL program to a new Windows application in our organization. This is a Visual Basic application that if I'm being kind I'd say is a kludge held together by the electronic equivalent of duct tape and glue. The thing is junk and crashes ALL THE TIME. IT didn't pick this app though - we just get stuck supporting it. However, no amount of explanation can convince these people that the program crashing is not IT's fault. We can reinstall it as many times as they ask for it. We can update everything on their computer. We can buy them a new computer. But the basic fact is the program you bought is crap and full of bugs and nothing IT does is going to make it stop crashing and screwing up data.

Sadly, this is a hard fact to make users accept.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Atlantis-Rising]

Mod parent funny.

Re:License Management Software!?

[MightyYar]

But then if your license server is down the software won't run, creating an artificial and unnecessary dependency

This is true, but as a practical matter if our network is down then all hell breaks lose when you try to use your box for lots of other reasons... can't log in, no access to shared drives, etc. At that point, the license server also not working isn't really what stops productivity :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[jgarra23]

Government work. Some government contracts require a percentage of the work to be done by minority/women/veteran/disadvantaged owned businesses.

There aren't enough minority/women/veteran/disadvantaged heart surgeons out there! I demand that we establish hiring quotas for all! There needs to be ethnic & cultural diversity within the heart surgeon community!! :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[Cormacus]

Well, that is the way pretty much all software companies seem to be going. The longer they can keep a particular application in service (ie, being sold to their customers) the higher their return on investment

( [# copies sold * cost/copy] / [# man hrs in development * salary/hr] == return on investment)

But they have to be able to keep selling compiled copies of that particular codebase if they want to follow that method. The problem comes in when a piece of software is *good enough* and the customers don't want to buy the next version.

(Case in point - my copy of MatLAB 5.0 that I got as a college freshman still works just FINE. It doesn't have all the fancy shmancy features that v7.6 has, but I DONT USE those features. Why should I continue to support Mathworks & Co by purchasing another license? I won't . . . unless my license expires . . .)

Re:License Management Software!?

[alexborges]

Not true. You only need to develop procedures for dealing with them once.

Of course, there are more than five licenses, but most say basically the same things.

Furthermore, OSS licenses do not restrict use, ever, they restrict distribution outside your company.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Richard Steiner]

For folks who are only RUNNING software and not modifying the source code, most of those open source licenses are complete nonissues. They apply to programmers modifying the code, not to end users.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software

Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software can get companies shut down, and corporate officers put in prison, due to Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA law violations.

One example. I have two operating systems. One is a F/OSS distribution of Linux. The other is Windows or a FIPS certified Linux distribution like SUSE or RedHat. This is a company that is publically traded, so falls under Sarbox.

Someone penetrates the machine via a bug in the OS and causes damage, or obtains info. With Windows, or a certified OS, I can tell the auditors that the operating system was certified by the US government with FIPS and/or Common Criteria, and I have used due diligence.

With a non certified OS, I do not have this protection. I can be held culpable because I did not follow due diligence. If the shareholders are pissed enough, someone is going to prison, and the company may be shut down by the SEC if the breach was big enough.

Free software is unusable by a lot of businesses for this, and contract reasons. I know a lot of businesses who pay Symantec and Mcafee tens of thousands of dollars a year for antivirus products installed on Solaris and AIX machines. Not because they will ever see a virus, but to check off a contract clause.

Re:License Management Software!?

[hobo sapiens]

haha, if that is true, that is SO sad!

I am starting a pet store, and I call it the Java pet store!

Re:License Management Software!?

[adisakp]

There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?

No there aren't any. Question answered, no need for an "Ask Slashdot"

Slashdot geeks get excited about writing OSS to be used by first of all themselves, then other geeks, then artistic or creative types.

Writing free software primarily to be used by what the original poster said is (scum-sucking implied) lawyers at his multimillion-dollar lawfirm is probably near the bottom of their charitable use of their free time in OSS development.

Re:License Management Software!?

[wiggles]

Your problem is right there in the second sentence. You work IT for a LEGAL firm. Nobody wants to write software for lawyers without charging big bucks, because lawyers tend to sue people who piss them off. You need the extra money to pay for the inevitable legal fees you'll incur just for having lawyers for clients.

Re:License Management Software!?

[mweather]

You think that's bad? Have you tried finding a non-Jewish moile or kosher butcher?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Muad'Dave]

Some government contracts require a percentage of the work to be done by minority/women/veteran/disadvantaged owned businesses.

Some government contracts require a percentage of the work to be done in violation of the anti-discrimination laws that the rest of us must obey.

There, fixed that for you. 8-~

Re:License Management Software!?

[initdeep]

you've never been to a heart surgeon have you?

Many of them are minorities.

in fact, in my experience (having a parent formerly work for one, and the other now seeing one regularly), the people considered minorities in society make up the majority of the heart surgeons.

Re:License Management Software!?

[initdeep]

stop using logic and common sense!
This is about freedom man!

errrr

Re:License Management Software!?

[noidentity]

And most of them, you're talking to the same guy for support that developed it, and filled the sales order. Out of his basement or garage. Multi-million dollar a year law firm, and it can be brought to its knees if one of our obscure applications goes down and needs support, and the one guy that can support it is out taking his kids to soccer practice.

I'm looking at you North Winds Software. I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing. If you answered the phone.

So why did a law firm like this put itself at the mercy of such a developer?

Re:License Management Software!?

[phorm]

Yup, for the big stuff. Quite often it's the little stuff that doesn't have a site-license and/or got brought in by individual employees, or installed on "one machine too many."

Heck, I wonder how many violations are out there just with illegit copies of font-packs, etc.

Re:License Management Software!?

[operagost]

Isn't the sort of thing that the BSA (no, not Boy Scouts) is useful for? Maybe you should join?

Re:License Management Software!?

[mweather]

How does the corporation get the software to it's end users without distributing it?

Re:License Management Software!?

[rudeboy1]

Wow... Lot of comments. Shouldn't have stepped away from /. for so long.

The problem isn't if there is a program out there better suited to the task. The problem is I'm a low man on a large IT team, and this is the software that has been chosen. Period. No amount of logic will persuade them to pick a different vendor, now that it has been implemented to some 800 users. Yes, my boss has pointy hair. If there is any Ask Slashdot question due, it is "Is anyone hiring?" I'm tasked with keeping this program up and running, despite the fact it sucks and support is almost nonexistent. It was no big deal for the last application support guy, but he was here for 17 years, and didn't write documentation. So, now when something breaks, I have to reinvent the wheel, and asking the vendor for support is (when I can actually get a hold of them) iffy at best.

Re:License Management Software!?

[rudeboy1]

Wrong company. I'm hesitating posting their "website", but they're based out of PA, not ID. Still pretty disadvantaged though, I'd say.

Re:License Management Software!?

[dilvish_the_damned]

What is a "disadvantaged business" anyway, and why would someone actually use that as a sales point?

Government work. Some government contracts require a percentage of the work to be done by minority/women/veteran/disadvantaged owned businesses.

I suspect "disadvantaged business" can also == retarded.

Re:License Management Software!?

[rudeboy1]

OK, you got me there. :)
But just for the record, I have done my best to take action, and been shut down by my pointy haired boss.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Angostura]

Not worth suing. Quite possibly worth giving as a juicy story to your favourite journalist.

Re:License Management Software!?

[rudeboy1]

I don't have lawyers for clients, I have lawyers for users (way worse in most respects...). I will say that this is by far the best funded IT department I've ever worked for. The only downside is, once you pick a solution, there's no going back to them and saying you changed your mind, you need more money for a different product. Makes no difference that that decision was made like 10 years ago, by someone else.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty shitty way to lose your job when they don't accept it, too.

Re:License Management Software!?

[tirnacopu]

But the XMMS devs did see almost all of what made Winamp useful in source form. Graphics: in easily readable jpegs. API: well documented. Plugins: loads of them, some with source code. Multimedia encoders and decoders: readily available as open source. The only thing that might have buggered them was Justin's visualisations :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Specs please?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on the other side of the divide---a tiny company that's not too much more than a guy in his garage (just a few of us), and frankly, I agree with you. I'm astonished at the way we do things, even though we sell to huge firms (including big law firms, like yours). Part of it is just size---we don't have the people or skills to do all the safety, security and support steps a big corporation would. Still, freaks me out that the crap I wrote is out there being used to do important things by important people who don't realize how dumb the guy who wrote their software actually is.

Re:License Management Software!?

[the_womble]

Slashdot geeks get excited about writing OSS to be used by first of all themselves, then other geeks, then artistic or creative types.

I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing software that would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers...

Re:License Management Software!?

[the_womble]

One example. I have two operating systems. One is a F/OSS distribution of Linux. The other is Windows or a FIPS certified Linux distribution like SUSE or RedHat.

Red Hat is definitely pure FOSS, I think SuSe probably is as well.

Re:License Management Software!?

[WK2]

A lot of people confuse EULAs, such as what Microsoft and a lot of proprietary companies use, and open source licenses. They both have "license" in the name, but are very different, and not comparable.

The main thread was about the pain of EULAs. EULAs are an attempt to prevent the end-user from using software in certain ways, and require extra people to help comply, even for stuff that the company never intends to distribute, such as the OS that runs on their computers, or utility software like VMWare. Then ArsonSmith (who was merely trolling) comes along and attempts to confuse the issue by talking about open source software, and saying how he hates those licenses, and would prefer a EULA.

Most of the software that a company uses, they never intend to distribute. OSes, word processors, database software, and stuff like that. In these cases, open source software would be easier to manage (license-wise), because there would be no licenses to manage, whereas EULAs are a pain. In the case of a software development company, and the company wants to distribute other people's software, open source licenses can be kind of confusing, and might need multiple people to sort out, but EULAs would be impossible. A EULA doesn't grant any distribution rights.

So, to compare a common proprietary app with an open source one, if you install Windows, you have to read a lengthy EULA and do the best you can to comply, whereas if you install Ubuntu, you don't have to read any licenses. If you distribute Windows, you get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars in court fees and settlements, etc, whereas to distribute Ubuntu, you have to make sure you are complying with the licenses.

Re:License Management Software!?

[FooBarWidget]

"standardized Corporate proprietary license"? Doesn't every proprietary software package have a different license?

Re:License Management Software!?

[afabbro]

The backup server not having the correct licenses is one of the biggest risks in a Disaster Recovery.

You mean, "a minor risk." Seriously. Calling your vendor (Symantec, IBM, whoever) and saying "we're doing a DR test and need to get temp licenses" should be part of your testing plan. All of the major backup software vendors are used to this. Of course, you should have your license info kept off-site with the rest of your documentation, etc., but running a full fire drill should include "our licenses are lost/don't work/the guy who knows where they are is dead, let's call Veritas and get a temp license."

Pretty standard in large organization DR testing.

Re:License Management Software!?

[IntlHarvester]

The problem is that every industry has a few of these super-specialized vertical apps that come from one-guy software companies. Most of them are fairly simplistic Access/FoxPro type things, the hard part was implementing all of the business rules.

I've worked with a few companies that recreated their software package in-house (because they needed specific customization the author wouldn't provide), and it's never as cheap or easy as it might seem superficially.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

The GP poster said "I'll BUY a support contract! If you offered such a thing." So paying for a primary developer or two might not be out of the question, especially if the costs can be split between a handful of lawfirms.

The question would then become why to make the product open source.

Re:License Management Software!?

[ActusReus]

There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?

Legal types have been posting feature requests for years, and can't even get OpenOffice to implement the Microsoft Word "Table of Authorities" feature necessary to write a basic case brief. The notion that someone's willing to write a law office specific case management system is just not plausible. See Slashdot's recent thread about industry-specific apps in Linux.

Re:License Management Software!?

[mentaldrano]

Heck with heart surgery, I'd like to see my auto mechanic, waste pickup person, or UPS driver occasionally be a woman. Not once have I ever seen a woman do any of those jobs, and no-one is screaming for equality there. Tell me again why this is okay but any disparity in research/politics/medicine/law is grounds for a federal law?

The one area that I have seen big changes in (even in my lifetime, and I'm only 29) is manufacturing. A LOT of young women in my hometown work in manufacturing plants, and do all the crap work that the men have to do as well. Why should other menial jobs be any different?

Re:License Management Software!?

[lukas84]

Add to the fact that this sort of business software is usually extremely boring to write and develop, and requires much more process knowledge than programming knowledge.

Re:License Management Software!?

[lukas84]

Doesn't change the fact that hey probably paid big money for the certification.

Re:License Management Software!?

[CodeBuster]

Multi-million dollar a year law firm, and it can be brought to its knees if one of our obscure applications goes down and needs support, and the one guy that can support it is out taking his kids to soccer practice.

If it was that important then why not simply negotiate a special agreement with the developer (which should be easy since he is a one man shop) whereby you receive a master copy that you can install as many times as you want and doesn't try to phone home all of the time (i.e. a special build just for your company) and you get to call his private cell number whenever you need support 24x7? It shouldn't be very hard for you guys to keep track of the contract either, since managing contracts and seeing that terms are met is what lawyers specialize in right?

Re:License Management Software!?

[PinkPanther]

If your software has real (business) value, then any customer will depend on its uptime, data consistency, optimal behaviour and enhanced future functionality. Therefore they'll pay for the software they are using.

If your software doesn't mean that much to them, in that they only are using whatever version they happened to have and don't care about any of the above, then the value of your software simply isn't worth what your company believes it to be.

Re:License Management Software!?

[lukas84]

Yeah, paying for people for their work seems like such a superfluos concept.

Maybe you should move to somewhere where communism rules.

Re:License Management Software!?

[void*]

He explicitly specified heart surgeons who were minorities, women, veterans, and disadvantaged.

I would expect the number of those to be relatively small even if the number who are minorities is large. ;)

Re:License Management Software!?

[Just Some Guy]

Maybe you should move to somewhere where communism rules.

1998 (and Steve Ballmer) want their anti-FOSS rant back.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't think the fines would keep large corporations in line.

Having seen the price tag on a fortune 500 failing an audit for 'enterprise licensed' software, I feel a lot better about my home mortgage.

You will also find, given at least adequate FOSS applications, a whole new level of Open Source evangelists in your company the day after the bill is paid. And if management decides to retain that software? Paying employees to do true-ups and post-audit compliance auditing remind them of what letting Random Joe Employee install things on his desktop cost.

1. Get giant enterprise license for Proprietary Package X with FOSS equivalent Y.
2. Install a "few" more than you have licenses.
3. Tip off the auditors.
4. ???
5. Prof- I mean, Open Source Takes over the World.

Is it just me, or is slashcode's support for order lists broken?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Skuld-Chan]

What do you know? http://www.northwind-inc.com/

Re:License Management Software!?

[harl]

"MS isn't the only guilty party in this, but those bastards certainly made the situation much worse."

Actually MS is the easiest licensing we have at our shop. This should be the case for any shop past a certain size, we're medium sized at best. No activation. No phone home. No dongles. With true licensing, or what ever the fuck they call it we can install any and all MS products. We have codes for all products. Once a year we count up and write the check.

From my point of view it's functionally equivalent to not having licensing.

Re:License Management Software!?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, that explains the lack of support.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Machtyn]

For most open source licenses, distribution of the binaries is trivial:

• make sure this notice goes with the binaries
• make sure this notice goes with the source files
• make sure the sources follow the binaries
• If you distribute my file, don't modify the source, remove files, remove this notice
• Don't charge for distribution
• Charge for cost of distribution only
• If you modify the source, keep it open to everyone else
• If you modify the source, don't distribute the modifications

etc...

/note: this list is an example of different types of items one might find in a license agreement. Obviously, some of these bullets are conflicting, but would not be found in the same license.

Re:License Management Software!?

[SpzToid]

Who is this North Winds Software of which you write? I did a quick google search for it, and only fielded a small collection of what really look like malware bait sites (so don't click any unless you have noscript).

http://www.google.nl/search?q=%22North+Winds+Software%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Seriously, I was just trying to learn more about their niche. I've just unburied my head from GnuCash on Linux, and I wonder what's possible. Aside from reports, GnuCash is solid once you get going with all your accounts. Reports work too, once you get what amounts to a few work-arounds because development just isn't mature there yet. Still, a nice book-keeping app on GTK/Ubuntu.

Intuit/Quicken wants my local Dutch banks to pay a ransom to associate with Quicken, and all banks decline. I foolishly kept buying Quicken thinking this'll be the year. Until I realized Intuit expected cash from both me and the banks, and that's when I realized Intuit didn't serve me like I expected to be served; especially since Intuit was holding me, the customer, hostage until the banks ponied-up their share, which is never gonna happen here.

Why does this matter? Because until this year I had to enter every damn transaction by hand, and then balance the books given my input errors. UGGH! NOW, I can download my bank's transactions, like a human being. GnuCash has been an investment for me. I'd like more people to know about the developers' solid work, and I hope to see reports improved upon.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nwinds.com/ is that them?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy is probably running his entire "company" using a sample Access database he customized--he just forgot to change the company name :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[db32]

Come on now..."complex legal patent systems"? That is an awefully fancy way of saying "point of sale system".

Also, "vascular cleansing" is terribly easy, it is keeping the patient alive through the process that is the tricky part.

Re:License Management Software!?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yes sir, done and done!

...

Aw, damn.

Re:License Management Software!?

[matuscak]

FWIW, ESX does in fact use FlexLM. In this case, it's not the license server that has gone down, but the code in ESX that is interperting the what the license server is returning that is broke.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moile is an archaic form of footwear. I think the term you meant to use is mohel.

Hmmm..."moile" and "mohel" are homophones, and "shoe and "Jew" are nearly homophones. Coincidence?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Strider-]

How does the corporation get the software to it's end users without distributing it?

If it's only done internally within the corporation, then it's not re-distribution. Redistribution implies selling/giving the software to customers.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoosh*

. x

My point was that (almost) no one who could write such a boring piece of code would actually need to use it themselves, so why would they write it for free?

Re:License Management Software!?

[brennz]

If someone wants to run virtual machines at home or in a small business, they're likely going to be more than satisfied with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX) and wouldn't even consider the much more complex ESX.

Speak for yourself here - Anyone that knows virtualization and loves free is going to choose ESXi since it now available for free. Over the past week I've been looking at some mid-low end x86 servers specifically for this function. free + type 1 hypervisor = ESXi

Re:License Management Software!?

[PitaBred]

Distribution refers to 3rd parties. A corporation's end users (it's employees) are still 1st parties, and thus not required to disclose the source to anyone outside of it's organization. Distribution is different in the legal world, just like many other terms.

Re:License Management Software!?

[gad_zuki!]

OSS doesn't solve the lack of support issue. Unless there's a signed support contract you'll find most companies wont want anything to do with it.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm an IBM software auditor. What company do you work for?

Thanks!

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The backup server not having the correct licenses is one of the biggest risks in a Disaster Recovery.

A lot of enterprise backup software will allow you to restore without a valid license, but your backup jobs won't run.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Arterion]

Don't you love the way that everyone in the world gets more respect than the local IT department? Anything a vendor, friend, or the internet says is completely valid and true, but if it comes out of the mouth of the IT department, it must be wrong.

Re:License Management Software!?

[merreborn]

when you install Purify, it increases the installed count in IBM's system, and decreases it when you uninstall...
I install Purify in a VMware virtual machine, snapshot it, uninstall Purify, and roll the virtual machine back to the snapshot. That way, Purify will work in the virtual machine, but IBM's servers will think I haven't used any of my licenses

Even better, you can repeat the rollback/uninstall process, and IBM will think you're using negative licenses!

Re:License Management Software!?

[beckerist]

I can give you plenty of MS Windows API's, plugins, and resources. I can give you the source code to quite a few OS's....still a long way from coding me Vista!

BTW: I will pass on my attempt at the snarkiness that will inevitably follow this comment in anticipation for the almighty Slashbrain to entertain me.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Ceseuron]

It's good to know the $2500 I had to shell out in support contract fees for two host nodes and VIC is funding such outstanding QA testing. /sarcasm off.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Kent Recal]

Great, a cluster of license-servers. How much more ridiculous can it get?
No wonder most would-be customers prefer pirate-bay retail...

Re:License Management Software!?

[bigstrat2003]

The unnecessary communism remark aside, he's right. Some software company provided you the fruits of their labor under certain terms. Not violating those terms should obviously be normal, and a tool which makes it easier for you to ensure you're playing fair is, in fact, helpful. If you're agreeing to play by their rules, you have to make sure you aren't breaking them accidentally.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Kent Recal]

I think if your DR-plan actually involves the phrase "let's call Veritas" then, umm, you have bigger problems.

Re:License Management Software!?

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, so that justifies taking it. Totally. Just like when I go to Wal-Mart, and see goods I feel are overpriced, I'm justified in taking them too!

Re:License Management Software!?

[Bryan Ischo]

Great idea! Does that mean IBM will start paying YOU for licenses?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most large companies usually have an entire person

I would hope so. Imagine if they committed only half, or a quarter of a person!?!?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't think the fines would keep large corporations in line.

You may not _think_ that but the idea of fines, legal issues and negative PR do keep large corporation in line, in my experience.

Re:License Management Software!?

[kelnos]

We're not talking about that. We're talking about companies using OSS internally for business purposes, not for selling/redistributing as part of a product.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's your problem....you forgot "baling wire".

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not real, you know... ;)

No wonder they're not answering the phone!

Re:License Management Software!?

[db32]

*whoosh* indeed apparently. Given that was my original point I had assumed you were making a joke rather than making a redundant point. Hence I made the jokes about your examples of complex industry specific software.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're suggesting that RedHat or Novell will include, and support, some random bit of obscure software that used by many one or two people in the entire world?

Re:License Management Software!?

[King_TJ]

Interesting .... but frankly, the only circumstances I've ever run across where a company takes the "If you don't like it, sue us!" attitude towards software licensing is when they feel they've already put up with enough/too much from the vendor in question.

I really do think major corporations are more likely to stay compliant on licensing, because they've got more to lose for starters, and have more employees who keep tabs on such things. (Generally, a small business may have the owner him/herself purchasing the software that's used - and everyone just takes his/her word that's it's all legal. A mid-sized business often still has a similar situation, where one or two I.T. people are responsible for the software and licensing. And as we all know, they're usually more interested in getting a job done than in screwing around with a bunch of documentation and details of licenses.) With larger companies, though, you've got actual people hired to do the "software compliance" checks, or you have larger I.T. departments where an individual who might otherwise just run some cracked software is afraid his co-workers could turn him in for it.

I can't speak for your specific software package, but I have a strong suspicion it was a case where your customer felt "morally, even if not legally justified" in installing all the extra seats. Maybe they had poor support in the past (shelling out big $'s for a maintenance agreement that was relatively useless?) or something along those lines?

Re:License Management Software!?

[adisakp]

I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing software that would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers.

This may be true. However, that's not what I said. Change your wording to "I am pretty sure that some of them would get excited about writing OPEN SOURCE software FOR FREE IN THE HOPE that IT would allow them to sell support contracts to rich lawyers" and the number of EXCITED developers becomes much smaller. In fact, I'm willing to venture that the value asymptotically approaches zero.

Furthermore, I wouldn't assume the person is "excited about writing software" as much as interested in "sell[ing] support contracts to rich lawyers". Programmers who are truly excited about their OSS projects would be working on them whether or not they got paid -- in this case, the "excitement" only comes with the pay.

And if making money is your goal when you write this theoretical small custom app for rich lawyers, I don't think the best business plan is to give the software away to lawyers for free, distribute it as open source, and hope to make money off support.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Nefarious Wheel]

...minorities, women, veterans, and disadvantaged.

Come to Australia, man -- we can't afford to waste talent like that.

Re:License Management Software!?

[jgarra23]

We still need quotas on Harvard Grads working at McDonalds too! There is a huge disparity of Harvard Grads vs. non-Harvard Grads working at McDonalds and other fast food restaurants! I demand that there be legislation enacted to ensure that enough Harvard Grads are working at McDonalds in EVERY position available. This inequality cannot stand!! :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[FrankieBaby1986]

Well, my company only uses half a person to manage licenses, the only problem is that once we cut them in half, they can only do their job for like a day before they, um, quit

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software.

Sorry, but I beg to differ. As a consultant working in different environments, I see a lot of companies who are running much more than their paid licenses allow. Usually, what I hear is "yeah, we're only licensed for x, but we're running x+n. We need to true-up at some point". Meanwhile, the vendor is losing out on cash flow at least, and long-term income at worst.

Re:License Management Software!?

[xenocide2]

Have you seen what it is lawyers actually do? They're professional disagreers. Getting multiple firms to agree on specs or terms would be a comedy of Emmy Award winning proportion.

Re:License Management Software!?

[TheRaven64]

The solution to this is to develop programming environments that are so easy to use that the people with the process knowledge can write the apps themselves. COBOL was the first attempt at this, VB and Access were others. Some of us are still working on the problem...

Re:License Management Software!?

[swb]

About freaking time. I was wondering when they were going to make a good bare-metal hypervisor without all the $$$$$ add-ons that won't really be used, although it looks like we're still kept from using ICH RAID and SATA disks.

Re:License Management Software!?

[TheRaven64]

Free Software does not have to be community developed. I'm sure there are a lot of people on Slashdot who would be interested in bidding for a contract to write a replacement for the buggy piece of software and provide the source to the lawyers under a license of their choice, complete with full documentation of the source so someone else could maintain it if required.

Re:License Management Software!?

[TheRaven64]

Have you ever tried to contribute to OpenOffice.org? The code is huge and quite hideous (worse than Mozilla). There are very few people in the world who understand it well enough to add something like a Table of Authorities.

Out of interest, how much are these legal types offering for someone to add this feature?

Re:License Management Software!?

[Skjellifetti]

Nope, they just were not paying attention or else thought we weren't. They'd bought a number of seats from us and then bought another company whereupon they proceeded to install our app on the desktops of the acquired company without paying us as the contract stipulated. This was 10 years ago. They obviously did not learn much in the interim about the importance of proper record keeping. They made a few too many subprime liar loans in the past 5 years with very little paperwork asked from their borrowers. This has cost them about $30 billion give or take so far.

Re:License Management Software!?

[TheRaven64]

But look at the complexities of the BSD

Have you read the BSDL? Of the variants still in use, the most complex has three clauses plus a standard disclaimer of liability. None of these refer to use, all refer to distribution. It takes about five minutes to read and say 'we're not distributing, no liability.'

Re:License Management Software!?

[mrbooze]

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software.

As someone who has worked in IT at various companies over the last 15+ years, I have to say, no it isn't. Fear of fines and prosecution is not remotely enough to stop unlicensed use of software. Most of the time, the people who would be afraid of that have no idea how out of compliance they are for some software. Particularly things like copies of Windows, Office, Visio, various little utilities that someone got a legal copy of and then shared it with their team, etc.

Now, having said that, all this license management crap *is* stupid and is more annoying to real customers than it is beneficial to software sales.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Through dancing, I have met a woman who worked as a helicopter maintenance mechanic.

Re:License Management Software!?

[oracle128]

"There are no feminists on a sinking ship"

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

what did you call me?

Re:License Management Software!?

[xenn]

you know what?

that's not a bad idea at all. actually quite a good starting point for a script.

Re:License Management Software!?

[mistahkurtz]

Working previously for a major IT reseller in the SMB marketplace, and currently for a major IT reseller in the enterprise marketplace, you'd be surprised how many companies are willing to see how far they can stretch that OEM license, or, how many IT managers don't want to be the ones to tell the CIO, CFO, CTO, CCO, etc that they are not and have not been compliant for years, and that it will take tens of thousands of dollars to get on the right track. (even though it's the big Cs that can take the brunt of the fine, especially in the SMB market).

when referring to your multi-national and very large enterprises, yes, i would say you're absolutely correct.

i've been to client visits, though, where their license keycodes are printed out on a paper, the same ones you'll find on a pirated copy of server 2003 enterprise, with a note that says "if key #1 doesn't work, try key #2", and so on.

remember this the next time your reseller partner is trying to get you compliant... the margins on software typically suck. but most of us understand licensing and the implications of misuse and misunderstanding of licensing programs.

ok, i'm done :)

Re:License Management Software!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Had an incident recently at work where our disk of an older version of some statistics software we use ended up in the hands of another admin without out knowledge. However, this other admin proceeded to install several copies of the software and went so far as to lie to their customer support to override the lock on the prior version's activation because we had already upgraded our single user to the new one.

Needless to say, this admin swears up and down it's their disk and they got it from another party who bought it. According to all our paperwork and the account rep, it's our disk (serial number/contract matchup).

Now we're in a pinch trying to track down and see if that software was installed outside our organization and it's going to be a nightmare to do so.

License management has serious uses these days, mostly because people are idiots. But I agree that it needs to be done well, I'm a huge fan of software that has a server-side authenticator you install at your site, and it just tracks the licenses. Complains if you don't have enough so that you can purchase more. Ghost, AutoDesk, etc all seem to work well with this model.

Re:License Management Software!?

[Gordonjcp]

Over here the kosher butchers are all run by Muslims. Makes sense, really.

Re:License Management Software!?

[supersnail]

Right let me see now.

Your head office has just been flooded and your trying to get the DR system up and running over a remote line.

Now where did I put that number for the Veritas?
Its in an e-mail -- but the f***g email system is what Im trying to restart.

many phone calls later:-

"Hello I need some temp licences urgently".
"Am pleasing to help you, customer number please".
"Our office is flooded I dont have the customer number".
"Am sorry to hear of your problems but system needs you cutomer number otherwise cannot be helping you". ................
   

Re:License Management Software!?

[_merlin]

I'd pass an audit - I'm not actually using any more instances of Purify than I'm allowed. I'm just not going to put up with the stupid license management scheme IBM forces on you.

Re:License Management Software!?

[VdG]

I'm not terribly familiar with VMWare and its licensing, but in general I think that the concern is that the customer will deploy more instances than they are licensed for. I've certainly been in the position that I wanted to get a piece of desktop software installed but the company had run out of licences for it.

I've also been in a similar position with server upgrades: wanting to upgrade a bunch of servers but not having licenses for all of them. It was very tempting to just do the upgrade and worry about the licenses later, which potentially would have denied the software provider revenue. (How likely would I have been to back-date my license purchase?)

Re:License Management Software!?

[VdG]

Figuring out all those things in advance is what DR testing is for.

I used to be heavily involved in DR: some of my tests even worked. :-) We encountered occasional licence problems but they were all very simple to resolve. Most of the stuff I was concerned with (AIX servers) didn't much care where it was run. The software which did had ways around it specifically for DR.
SAP, for example, has a quick tool you can run to get a temporary licence, good for 30 days, iirc.

Really, it's not that difficult. Or if it is, the problems are with amateurish software providers or poorly conceived DR plans and testing.

Re:License Management Software!?

[samwichse]

You would be correct!

The USDA uses Melwood heavily. They're [mostly] good folks.

Sam

Re:License Management Software!?

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, but writting that kind of software pays.

Re:License Management Software!?

[PinkPanther]

Okay, so ignoring the piracy-is-not-theft angle you've trounced on, I didn't say anything about it being "right". What I am saying is that if the customer does value the product (or the results thereof, or the data stored within), then they'll eventually come around to paying for it.

If your product is something that people are using simply because it is there but don't care about whether it works beyond today, then fighting to get them to pay is a losing strategy for everyone.

If you make your paying customers jump through hoops to use your product, they waste time/money.

If you make it difficult/impossible for non-paying people to play with your product, then you are killing a potential (and powerful) sales strategy.

So rather than chasing down those who aren't currently paying, place your resources into those who do pay (i.e. support them) and work on making your product MORE VALUABLE for those who aren't paying (those using it and those not using it).

Valuable enough, they'll pay. Not valuable enough, they won't. It doesn't get more basic than that. Fighting this reality by going after non-paying users ends up hurting everyone.

The non-paying users are not stealing from you. They currently don't value the software the way that you do (or you wish they did). But their using it obviously continues to increase its value to them...to the point where they'll (a) want to upgrade/get support/customize and (b) let others know that they are using this product.

I'm not saying it isn't worth discussing the situation with them. But I think making a huge stink about it and turning to litigation is not helping anyone one out (except the lawyers, of course).

Re:License Management Software!?

[Marauder2]

You would be correct!

The USDA uses Melwood heavily. They're [mostly] good folks.

Sam

Melwood is used by many Government agencies for custodial services. I have heard them talking about their contracts with HUD and the White House in some of their radio advertisements. And the agency I work for also uses their custodial services.

Re:License Management Software!?

[King_TJ]

Wow!

Well, like my dad (a physics teacher) used to always say, "The two most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity!"

Re:License Management Software!?

[agbinfo]

That audit log is good... for an audit :) But, you do also want to prevent them from violating licensing terms as much as possible.

The problem with that approach is that you punish your customers and reduce the visibility of your product.

Just telling customers they violated licensing after the fact isn't enabling them to follow their own policies.

You are not restricted to providing the information after the fact. You can provide a small application that parses the log regularly and sends an email if a problem appears. A customer could receive an email such as "in the past week, you have used up to 90% of the licenses on 3 occasions."

On the application side, a note could indicate that the number of licenses is exceeded or that it can't communicate with the "license server" but still start the application.

I think the main thing to address for those kinds of customers is that if they absolutely have to do something without being licensed, then you have to give them some way to do it. You don't want to bring them completely to a halt because a hardware key broke or something. As long as that's the case, then a licensing bug shouldn't be fatal for the customers productivity.

I agree and that's what I'm proposing. Work on the honor system but provide tools to your customers so that they can tell if they are not true to their engagements. With the ability to audit, you provide an additional incentive to do so.

Re:License Management Software!?

[ps2os2]

I used to work at a large bank and practically every piece of OEM software had a license that was tied to the CPU serial number IIRC we had 12 systems and each one of those had between 2-12 serial numbers. Every year (almost) we would do a swap out of a system and replace it with a new system. This entailed hours of phone calls to various vendors. We would have all the information ready at least two days before the planned uninstall and re-install. 80 percent of the time it went on without an issue. Yes a lot of sweat and time was put in. What was really fun were these two scenarios 1. The vendor would give us the incorrect key and the product would not work on the new system. What happened next was sort of semi fun. We would call the vendor at 3 AM (or so) and ask what the correct key was. we got one of three answers call back when the office opens at 9 AM locally or a temporary key that would let us continue. The 3rd type was we are closed call back at 9 AM local time. It was a hard call to make as de-installation of the new computer would take 5-6 hours and to re-install the old one another 4-5 hours (lots of cabling to redo. It also dependent on how critical the software was. We just woke up a high up VP and let him make the call. It only happened a few times but we managed to get rid of a few software vendors because of that issue. We also from then on only signed with vendors that had 24x7X365 support.

Re:License Management Software!?

[ArsonSmith]

Actually the GPL does have a restriction of use clause in it. If the GPL is found to be invalid due to patent or court decision than nobody has rights to distribute the code.

Can't start processes?

[oldspewey]

any processes with a start date of today would refuse to run? Supposedly a fix will be available... in 36 hours.

Good thing the fix will be available tomorrow, because if it was available today nobody would be able to run the update process

Re:Can't start processes?

[Anonymous Coward]

There probably is no "fix" they are just waiting for the problem to go away

I can just see the programmers reaction when he sees the bug report.

"so the process wont start if it has todays date? hmm.." he then proceeds to set the target date for tomorrow and takes the day off

Re:Can't start processes?

[jebrew]

wait for it...wait for it...

Re:Can't start processes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear VMware Customers,
Please find the latest update about the product expiration issue. From this point on, weâ(TM)ll provide an update every two hours. Thanks.
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.
Affected Products:
â VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2
â Reports of problems with ESX 3.5 U1 with the following 3.5 Update 2 patch applied.
                1. ESX350-200806201-UG
â No other VMware products are affected.
What has been done?
â Product and Web teams pulled the ESX 3.5 Update 2 bits from the download pages last night so no more customers will be able to download the broken build.
â VMware Engineering teams have isolated the cause of the problem and are working around the clock to deliver updated builds and patches for impacted customers.
â A Knowledgebase article has been published (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006716), but traffic to the knowledgebase is causing time outs. A new static page has been published at http://www.vmware.com/support/esx35u2_supportalert.html that customers and partners will be able to view.
â The phone system has been updated to advise customers of the problem
â Vmware partners have been notified of the issue.
Workarounds:
1. Do not install ESX 3.5 U2 if it has been downloaded from VMwareâ(TM)s website or elsewhere prior to August 12, 2008.
2. Set the host time to a date prior to August 12, 2008. This workaround has a number of very serious side affects that could impact product environments. Any Virtual Machines that sync time with the ESX host and serve time sensitive applications would be broken. These include, but are not limited to database servers, mail servers, & domain administration systems.
Next Steps:
VMware to notify customers who have downloaded this version and provide an update every two hours.
Resolution:
VMware Engineering has isolated the root cause and is working to produce an express patch for impacted customers today. The target timeframe is 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST.
FAQ:
1. What would this express patch do?

More information will be provided in subsequent communication updates.
2. Will VMware still reissue the upgrade media and patch bundles in the timeframe that has been communicated?

Yes. We still plan to reissue upgrade media by 6pm, August 13 PST (instead of noon, August 13 PST) and all update patch bundles later in the week. We will provide an ETA for the update patch bundles subsequently. NOTE: the "patch bundles" referred to here are for the patches listed above under "Affected Products" and the other bundles released at GA. They are not the same as the express patch which is targeted for 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST as stated above.
3. Why does VMware plan to reissue the upgrade media before the patch bundles? That is a wrong priority call!

This is not a matter of priority. Since we can get done building and testing the upgrade media before the patch bundles, we want to make that available to customers first instead of reissuing all the binaries later in the week.
4. Can VMware issue a patch that opens the licensing backdoor in the next hour as a critical measure?

There is no licensing backdoor in our code.
5. Does this issue affect VC 2.5 Update 2?

No.
6. What is VMware doing to make sure that the problem wonâ(TM)t happen again?

We are making improvements on all fronts. The product team had endeavored to deliver a release with support customers deem important. But we fell short and we are deeply sorry about all the disruption and inconveniences we have caused. We have identified where the holes are and they will be addressed to restore customersâ(TM) confidence.

what do you expect?

[larry bagina]

Who knows what else is lurking in their code base? Certainly not me or you -- we can't see it. We're at their mercy to find and fix problems.

I stick to virtualbox. I'm not going to pretend I've audited the source code, but if I need to, I can.

Say YES to freedom.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then give me USB support in VirtualBox. Cause I kinda need that the most.

Re:what do you expect?

[mweather]

My office super glued all the USB ports shut, so that's not really a consideration.

Re:what do you expect?

[dctoastman]

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

What if you can't even trust your compiler? At some point, even with fully open, GPL-compliant software, there is some point you just have to trust someone else to not jack you.

Re:what do you expect?

[gardyloo]

Actually, that office buys computers from 17-year-old boys. That's not glue.

Re:what do you expect?

[tlacuache]

I've heard people say this, and I'm honestly curious... what exactly do you need USB for in your virtual machines? Printing? Webcam? I use VirtualBox basically so I can run a few Windows-only apps. For copying files between the host and the guest I use SCP. I print over the network. I'm not trolling, I'm honestly curious. What USB hardware do you need in your VMs?

Re:what do you expect?

[ray-auch]

USB license dongle for the application software running on the VM.

Seriously. Last week.

Re:what do you expect?

[baadger]

For me it is webcam/video messaging.

My webcam is supported through a shoddy out of tree kernel driver that produces unusable images with terrible picture quality.

Re:what do you expect?

[LWATCDR]

In the industry I am in there is a lot of hardware devices that you must use and some of those use USB.
I have some users that want to use a Mac and run our Windows software in a VM and use those devices.

I admit that it is rare but there are people that use industry specific hardware and the newer stuff uses USB.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're working on it. Apparently there is a major release due in a few weeks. Not sure when, but maybe before October?

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=8528

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a usb dongle to get access to my company's VPN.

Re:what do you expect?

[ReiDragon]

The printer drivers for my vista machine at home are absolutely horrid (They're beta drivers that can only print text with any quality) and I use a VM with usb support to print out of XP to get the photo quality prints.

Re:what do you expect?

[laffer1]

We need to use USB devices in Windows XP in our computer labs at work. In our case, we're using Mac OS X so using parallels or vmware is the easiest solution. Unfortunately, half of the devices cause kernel panics. If that weren't the case, we would not need to use boot camp and it would indeed make our lives easier. Only one or two classes need Windows for anything.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling, I'm honestly curious. What USB hardware do you need in your VMs?

Bluetooth

My PDA's dock

A canon SLR camera, the remote capture software for which doesn't run on x64

my wacom tablet

Re:what do you expect?

[John Hasler]

> What if you can't even trust your compiler?

You are referring to "Reflections on Trusting Trust" I assume. That is not really a practical attack in the real world.

> At some point, even with fully open, GPL-compliant software, there is some point you
> just have to trust someone else to not jack you.

A supplier of Free Software can never be sure that someone he doesn't even know about let alone control will decide to review his source code.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then give me USB support in VirtualBox. Cause I kinda need that the most.

i'm quite sure that the "HOW-TO" for that USB issue included in the fine-documentation (i had the same problem before).

Re:what do you expect?

[cerberusss]

Even if your webcam is fully supported in-kernel on Linux, with which software are you going to use it? MSN? Hehheh. Skype? Still lots of incompatibilities. Ekiga? None of your friends use it.

Lots of reasons to use a cam under Windows.

Re:what do you expect?

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I've always found that somewhat funny, a determined person will easily find a way to get data outside of a company. Hell, open up a web browser and email it to yourself via a plethora of webmail sites.

Since most office workers aren't the brightest bunch you could disable USB in the BIOS and password it, you could also disable USB in the device manager in windows and set the users as normal (non local administrator) accounts.

Re:what do you expect?

[JustinOpinion]

At some point, even with fully open, GPL-compliant software, there is some point you just have to trust someone else to not jack you.

Absolutely. I use computers with closed-source chip design and BIOS. And even though I can read source code, I obviously have not inspected every line of code on my Linux system. And even with scrutinized code, my compiler could be compromised, as you noted.

But, as with all security and trust questions, the objective isn't to achieve perfect security/trust (which is impossible) but to achieve a level of security/trust that is as high as possible (or as high as the application demands).

The more open the code is, and the more people who look at it, the more trust I will put in it. I don't have to inspect the code myself every time. If a trusted third-party trusts the code (e.g. Ubuntu maintainers put it into their repositories), that will increase my trust in it. Perfect trust is impossible. But, all other things being equal, I have more reasons to trust open and scrutinized code than I do to trust closed proprietary code that only a handful of people have ever looked over.

Re:what do you expect?

[DaemonDazz]

(-1: Ewww)

Re:what do you expect?

[Amitz Sekali]

There is a possibility that parent probably doesn't expect to be modded funny. I used to consider glueing all USB port when I still used windows since I couldn't find a way to disable access to usb flash at that time.

Re:what do you expect?

[SQLGuru]

I'd rather have better video support than USB support so that you play games in a virtual machine (and by games, I mean games beyond 2D games from the early 90's). If a virtual machine would support something like DirectX or OpenGL so that I could have the kids running their games in a virtual machine (and being able to install them, etc.) I would have them set up with a locked down OS with a virtual system for their games.

There are some options, but they haven't been successful for me yet. But I'm sure the technology is getting closer.

Layne

Re:what do you expect?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Freedom is all good, and I am usually the first in line to promote Free Software, but what my customers need are high VM performance, High Availability, Vmotion, DRS, etc.

Unfortunately Vmware is pretty much the only game in town for all the advanced stuff.

The day when one of the Open Source solutions can pull all that stuff off will be the day I sold my last Vmware license because I actually hate the bastards with passion for their idiotic decisions regarding the whole unholy (Windows only) mess called "Virtual Center" and its associated (Windows only of course) license server crap, fruits of which retardation can be easily seen in this here episode.

Re:what do you expect?

[fishbowl]

>My office super glued all the USB ports shut

Just the external ports? Or did they epoxy all the USB headers on the motherboard?

Re:what do you expect?

[0100010001010011]

GPS. Microsoft Street and Trips is one of the very few Windows programs I run on my MacBookPro.

Re:what do you expect?

[funaho]

Do webcams even work under VMware? The last time I tried that under VMware server, which was admittedly about two years back, it just threw up an error saying that it didn't support isochronous mode USB.

Re:what do you expect?

[Dog-Cow]

On my Macbook, I use USB support to get my GPS usable in my WinXP VM. Garmin has been promising OS X support for ages, but it's not here yet AFAIK.

If VMware Server had the same level of USB support as does VMware Fusion (Workstation product for OS X), I'd use it at work for my iTouch.

Re:what do you expect?

[nurb432]

Ya, its free, and virtual box is no enterprise solution either. So we are comparing apples and oranges here..

Sure, its cool on a persons desktop to run non critical stuff on, but its no where close to being a product you would run off and virtualize 1000+ production servers with, which is the target market for ESX

Re:what do you expect?

[nurb432]

Cameras, key dongles, custom communication hardware ( like ODBII ), USB isn't just about file storage devices.

Re:what do you expect?

[grub]

No need for SCP, VirtualBox can share a directory with the host OS. I often use it to transfer things between the Ubuntu host and the XP guest.

Re:what do you expect?

[tlacuache]

Thank you for all the informative replies.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Until you use vMotion to move the app to another physical server in order to do maintenance and the app stops running because it can't find the USB dongle anymore.

Re:what do you expect?

[Sylver Dragon]

I'll be even more specific than many. I support ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop (and their other stuff as well, but that is beside the point). In order to run the ArcInfo level of ArcDesktop, you are required to run a license server with a USB dongle. In fact, much of the software which revolves around the GIS community uses the same god damned, piece of shit, worthless license manager software (FlexLM). I'm lucky to get through the day without swearing about this junk at least once. It's engendered a special version of Tourette's Syndrome in me.

Like most license servers, it needs just enough resources to boot and respond to network requests, in other words, about as much as a pocket calculator. It also needs to be on, always. A perfect candidate for virtualization; it gets the needed resources, doesn't have to be collocated with another service which might require a reboot from time to time, and can be in a high availability cluster, so it stays on. The reason this isn't on my ESX servers, is that it has to have that stupid USB dongle.

All that said, seeing the bug in VMWare this morning, aw fuck me!

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use USBAnywhere. It sucks they don't support native USB passthru yet, but this works in the meantime.

Re:what do you expect?

[adisakp]

I stick to virtualbox.

That's probably fine for you but not an answer for businesses that need features of VMWare that VirtualBox doesn't offer.... like the ability to migrate VM's or even the ability to make simple branched snapshots. I've actually played with VirtualBox quite a bit in the past week or two and I've found that it lacks many features compared to my old VMWare 5.5.

I've been evalutating whether to upgrade to VMWare 6.0 (well 6.5 beta now) and whether or not VirtualBox will serve my needs as just a power user. Basically, I'm not unhappy with the what I get for free with VirtualBox but I definitely am beginning to see more and more value in the $99 upgrade to the latest VMWare.

And no, I don't have the time (and probably not the expertise) to personally add the dozen or so features that I've noticed in casual use are missing from VirtualBox compared to VMWare to the OSS code. If you're doing anything other than the simplest use of VM's, you'll eventually run into limitations with VirtualBox. This might change in the future, but VirtualBox is way far behind the pack feature-wise of the for-pay VM's.

Re:what do you expect?

[ratboy666]

So, you need at least two C compilers, with at least one (or both) source available.

Example: build GCC with SUN CC, then GCC to build itself -- presto, "hidden blob patches" are gone. Of course, you are making the assumption that (1) GCC source is "clean", and SUN CC doesn't know to put back trapdoor when it sees GCC source.

Of course you can build your own C compiler - base on something like TCC. But you may be paranoid, and assume that the MACHINE detects sequences (standard prologues). Getting rid of those probably means you are forced to LLVM and a JIT. Or, compile the compiler by hand the first time.

Re:what do you expect?

[BlueCollarCamel]

I run a Windows VM with VMWare Player so I can use my Zune. As soon as VirtualBox supports USB I'll jump ship.

Re:what do you expect?

[tlacuache]

As far as I understood it, VirtualBox does support USB in the binary distribution you can download here. VirtualBox's "Open Source Edition (OSE)" doesn't support USB, see here. But if you're running VMWare Player (a closed-source product) anyway, the non-Free/Open aspect of it must not be a hangup for you (nor is it for me). So what's your holdup for running the "closed" distribution of VirtualBox. You'd have USB and, unlike VMware Player, could actually create new virtual machines.

Re:what do you expect?

[BlueCollarCamel]

I didn't know the binary distribution did support USB. Jumping ship now. Thanks for the info!

Re:what do you expect?

[afidel]

They have networked USB dongles now =) Of course that probably is a way to work around the lack of USB support in the non-VMWare virtualization solutions as well =)

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wifi dongles.

Wireless NICs runing on the host OS are virtualized as ethernet NICs. Without USB support and an USB dongle the guest can't be used to do advanced wireless stuff, like setting the dongle on monitor or AP mode.

I currently use VMWare only because of this. Having a secure AP using OpenBSD or Linux runing inside a VM is sort of cool.

Concretely, USB is the only reliable way to attach hardware to the VM. This also applies to CD-DVD recorders, soundcards, etc...

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then give me USB support in VirtualBox. Cause I kinda need that the most.

Don't use the OSE then, the binaries available from virtualbox.org have USB device support (at least in 1.6.2). Although then you're bound by the PEUL which will require you to pay money for using it in a corporate environment.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox has had decent USB support for some time now. It works well for me and allows me to use my Canon scanner without re-booting into Windows.

Re:what do you expect?

[LarryRiedel]

the PEUL which will require you to pay money for using it in a corporate environment.

The license says: "Personal Use" requires that you use the product on the same Host Computer where you installed it yourself and that no more than one client connect to that Host Computer at a time for the purpose of displaying Guest Computers remotely.

I see nothing indicating I need to pay money to use it in a corporate environment.

Larry

Re:what do you expect?

[schwagner]

Backup drives. We use (and sell to our clients) large USB drives that get switched out every day instead of tapes. They're a little more fragile than tape, but a 1TB drive holds a lot more than a DAT 72.

Re:what do you expect?

[againjj]

> At some point, even with fully open, GPL-compliant software, there is some point you > just have to trust someone else to not jack you.

A supplier of Free Software can never be sure that someone he doesn't even know about let alone control will decide to review his source code.

The GP is correct. You have to trust others to not jack you.

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

USB support exists in the non-open non-free for commercial use version. I'd rather pay enterprise licenses for VirtualBox which is mostly open, rather than VMWare which is completely closed and likely to stay that way.

Re:what do you expect?

[Johnno74]

Where I work we recently got a new 3g wireless modem for use in a remote site outside our network.
The machine at this site is XP, but we needed to set it up before it went out, and the crappy usb drivers for this modem didn't like Vista. (Actually the first thing we've found that refuses to work with vista - I am using informix odbc drivers that must be 10 years old, no problems at all)

Fired up a XP virtualbox vm, mapped the USB device to the VM... The usb drivers happily installed in the VM and It Just Worked.

So, to answer your question. USB support in a VM is very handy for legacy devices. If you were running linux as your main OS I imagine it would be VERY handy, for all those devices that don't supply linux drivers.

Re:what do you expect?

[Twisted64]

Yes, printers. If someone has a USB printer they need to share, I'd much rather serve it from their virtual server with any stupid software it requires. Hardware print servers and compatibility make me cry.

Re:what do you expect?

[tlacuache]

This is kind of a kludgy solution, but what I've done in other circumstances with this sort of a need is install PDFCreator in my Windows VMs, print to that, then copy the PDF to another machine to print. Hope that helps you. Probably won't. :)

Re:what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the "full release" (not in the open-source edition), a USB controller is emulated so that any USB devices attached to the host can be seen in the guest. If VirtualBox acts as an RDP server, it can also use USB devices on the remote RDP client as if they were connected to the host.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox

Ummm... How?

[Darkness404]

How would this bug even happen? I can't think of any way except for something dealing with time how it would even have a bug.

Re:Ummm... How?

[cduffy]

If you read the article, you'd know it's the license-management code. Licenses expire.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Goaway]

License managers generally deal with time a lot, and it's the license manager which is buggy.

Re:Ummm... How?

[gatzby3jr]

The reason this is a bug is because the licenses didn't expire.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Darkness404]

Ah, see, another reason why free software always is better

Re:Ummm... How?

[cduffy]

Yes, but the fact that licenses expire explains why the code checks dates, which is what the parent was doubting.

Re:Ummm... How?

[tehcyder]

If you read the article, you'd know it's the license-management code. Licenses expire.

I did wonder why everyone was suddenly going on about license-management so much...

Re:Ummm... How?

[repvik]

It's kind of similar to the bug that was in an early version of the firmware on Siemens ME/S45 mobile phones. If you opened the calendar in the month of April, the phone would promptly turn off (If the phone crashes, it turns off, presumably to ensure a reset).
Some bugs just boggle the mind. How do they manage to create a bug like that at all?

Re:Ummm... How?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, my sony-erricson reboots whenever you try to send a SMS text. Of course this only appeared a month after I bought it.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was not license management code, it was a product time-limitation (such as used to expire Beta products) that was accidently left on during a release-build.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly than that: humans make mistakes with kill switches.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Tony Hoyle]

It also affects the 'free' ESXi, which has an unlimited license.

VMWare left some dev code in apparently.. it's not related to the licenses specifically.

Re:Ummm... How?

[cduffy]

No, it was not license management code, it was a product time-limitation (such as used to expire Beta products) that was accidently left on during a release-build.

Controlling whether users are is permitted to use software past a certain date (whether on account of payment/nonpayment status or due to a wish to force beta users to upgrade) is certainly license management -- look up the word "license" in any dictionary.

Re:Ummm... How?

[Anonymous Coward]

The proprietary version of Virtualbox has no such license management.

Workaround available

[fredr1k]

A workaround is possible Turn off NTP time on the host. And manually (using the VIC) change that date to one week backwards in time. Voila all set to work.

Re:Workaround available

[Anonymous Coward]

and what about your auditing logs then ?

Re:Workaround available

[d_ron_218]

The only way to run a Windows domain controller in VMware is to tie its clock to the physical host's clock. And lots of things break if your domain controllers have the wrong time (Kerberos authentication, NTP across the Windows network, etc, etc). So changing the host clock would generally be a bad idea.

Re:Workaround available

[Sobrique]

I've had oodles of grief from VMs running as DCs for exactly this reason - they pick up clock skew as they're not running _quite_ in real time. And so they drift, and as soon as they hit the ... is it 5 minute? Kerberos window, your whole domain goes nuts.

Troubleshooting that one was fun.

Re:Workaround available

[exi1ed0ne]

1) edit the vmware config file to include the line:

host.cpukHz = XXXXX

Where XXXXXis your CPU in kilohertz

2) enable time sync via vmware tools

3) modify Type in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters from "Nt5DS" to "NoSync"

That's always taken care of clock skew issues on DCs for me.

Re:Workaround available

[mikael]

There are some software-licensing modules which will actively shut down all licenses if they detect any discontinuity of the system clock time. One time our admin resynced all the workstation time-clocks to GMT and several animation applications expired their license keys.

Re:Workaround available

[seanadams.com]

they pick up clock skew as they're not running _quite_ in real time

That makes no sense - the machine isn't spinning in a loop, counting instruction cycles, to keep track of time. It has to come from something like periodic interrupt or an RTC. There nothing about being in a VM, or anything else about the precision of the CPU core clock, that could "dilate" those timings. Maybe you might miss some interrupts for some reason, but if that's the case then it is probably the fault of the VM, not the guest.

Re:Workaround available

[Penguinisto]

Given that VMWare (or any VM really) is really sloppy about keeping accurate system time on the clent VM's (to be charitable about it)? I doubt that NTP or the lack thereof would actually help all that much.

/P

Re:Workaround available

[totally bogus dude]

It's actually pretty complicated. VMware have a PDF which goes into quite a bit of detail on the subject: https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

The basic gist is that VMs aren't running all the time; this is kind of the point of virtualisation w.r.t. server consolidation. Generally this is a good thing, because you can merge a dozen servers that average 5% CPU usage onto a single host. But since the guests are not running all the time, they can't possibly receive every interrupt as it happens. Therefore the hypervisor has to fake them in some manner, and that gets a bit tricky.

Re:Workaround available

[Anonymous Coward]

This depends on your infrastructure. We have an onsite NTP server. Our PDC pulls from that and pushes out time to all DCs which pushes out time to all clients. With 3.x and above we haven't had any time issues doing it this way - and not one of them is tied to the physical host clock.

However, as a note, if you try this in 2.x your systems will die a horrible death because the 2.x clock skew is much greater.

Re:Workaround available

[GoRK]

You are simplifying the problem enormously and taking for granted the complexity of making computer time work right especially in VM's. VMware has a whitepaper that is a pretty substantial read, but in your simplistic view, let's say your timekeeping is based on a periodic interrupt that fires, say, 1000 times per second. Well, for some tasks that is not even sufficient because you might do one hundred times that many context changes in the same time, so in effect even if you have an interrupt source, you still need a more precise timekeeping mechanism. So you have things like jiffies in Linux and a whole host of other junk that tries to keep everything in sync. So what about reading the RTC? How are you going to keep time while you talk to that clock over the legacy bus? How are you going to deal with the hardware clock's own skew? But when you add a VMM on top of things you can't even guarantee that you can send 1000 interrupts to the VM every second, nor can you ensure that its more precise timekeeping functions will hold up when cycles are stolen. Emulating the RTC is possible, but due to the way it works, it's not efficient to do this in a VM anyway.

Currently the best way to do timekeeping in vmware is via paravirtualization and running an NTP client in the VM. Paravirtualization allows the guest to understand when cycles are stolen and compensate for clock skew itself. Unfortunately there isn't a magic bullet solution like that for Windows guests yet, but I suspect once Hyper-V really starts to flub on the time things that MS will be forced to put some kind of clock hooks in there that vmware or anyone can take advantage of... might be a while though.

My head hurts.

[dc29A]

My head hurts reading that article. Who the fuck wrote it? A ten year old mental retard?

It's like ............... this and VM's this VM's that (Yes, notice the spelling?). Ooooh and the cyberwarfare boogeyman! You can't even find this much Hollywood scenario fear mongering from Hollywood themselves. Oh noes! Our entire infrastructure will be killed by evil cyber terrorists because it runs on VMware!

Oh and and lovely parts like 'w/' instead of 'with'. Hey douchebag, this is not SMS, is it so hard to hit another 2 keys on your keyboard? Oh and for the love of $DEITY$, please learn basic HTML and use links so I don't have to copy paste text into the address bar.

As for Slashdot editors, why the fuck did they pick the worse possible article from the Firehose when plenty others look *WAY* more professional?

Re:My head hurts.

[dotancohen]

Even worse, he got the meme wrong. The title of the blog post should have been "All your VM are belong to us". Idiot.

Re:My head hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

for the love of $DEITY$

That's either $DEITY or %DEITY%, please learn basic shell scripting for your platform :)

Morale: if you're gonna rant, make sure you do not make the same mistakes as the target of your rant

Re:My head hurts.

[kiwimate]

for the love of $DEITY$

That's either $DEITY or %DEITY%, please learn basic shell scripting for your platform :)

Morale: if you're gonna rant, make sure you do not make the same mistakes as the target of your rant

That's moral, which is a lesson to be learned. Morale refers to high spirits, or lack thereof, as in "his morale was crushed when he realized his error in verbiage".

Re:My head hurts.

[stevied]

$DEITY$ is quite clearly a custom CVS keyword, albeit with the capitalization convention wrong, $Deity$ would be more usual ;-)

Re:My head hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

... *worst* possible article ...

You know, since we're being pedantic and all.

Re:My head hurts.

[mr_mischief]

Version control... So that's how all these deities keep coming back from the dead?

Re:My head hurts.

[Bob The Cowboy]

Morale: if you're gonna rant, make sure you do not make the same mistakes as the target of your rant

Ahem. You mean Moral?

Re:My head hurts.

[windsurfer619]

for the love of $DEITY$

That's either $DEITY or %DEITY%, please learn basic shell scripting for your platform :)

Morale: if you're gonna rant, make sure you do not make the same mistakes as the target of your rant

That's moral, which is a lesson to be learned. Morale refers to high spirits, or lack thereof, as in "his morale was crushed when he realized his error in verbiage".

I spent 20 minutes trying to further this string of grammar naziism but have been reduced to mockery of your HTML tags.

Re:My head hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's [b]verbiage[/b], you idiot, not...no, you got it right. You're supposed to leave a typo for someone else to continue the flame chain. (Like I did with those incorrect tags.)

Re:My head hurts.

[dodobh]

Google for PostgreSQL dollar quoting.

Re:My head hurts.

[peacefinder]

Wow, recursive grammar pwnage.

Re:My head hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

... as in "his morale was crushed when he realized his error in verbiage".

The period always goes inside the closing quotation mark, dumbass. Unless you're British.

Re:My head hurts.

[IBitOBear]

Maybe he was using CVS instance-time substitution tags, which are formatted $WORD$ (like $ID$ to insert the current id string).

Moral: don't presume to correct someone till you know the language they are speaking, and know the difference between Moral and Morale before your cohort fails an important dice check...

Re:My head hurts.

[FatMacDaddy]

Just to keep the critiques going:

Your word choice is impeccable. Your punctuation is not. Periods and commas always go inside the quotation marks.

(Then again, the guy might be a Brit, and I think they do things differently over there.)

Re:My head hurts.

[fo0bar]

He keeps his deity in a Nagios service check.

Re:My head hurts.

[Wowlapalooza]

I'm amazed that no-one has pointed out (that I've noticed) that "council" isn't a verb either.

Re:My head hurts.

[FilthCatcher]

Then again, the guy might be a Brit, and I think they do things correctly over there.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:My head hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent insightful!

Re:My head hurts.

[kiwimate]

The period always goes inside the closing quotation mark, dumbass. Unless you're British.

Which I am. Almost. Well, closer to that than an American. Sort of. New Zealander living in the US. But with 30 years of NZ (read: British but with better accents, at least to American girls (or the ones I've met, anyway)) grammar, I claim adherence. Or closer.

Yes, it is a bug

[evilpenguin]

But the real bug is license enforcement in the first place. Why would you run the risk of making your business depend on the whims of someone else's IP policies and enforcement?

Now, I'm somewhat realistic. I know that there isn't (yet) an adequate replacement for every piece of closed proprietary software out there. But for my own business (admittedly small) I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code. And it is working. I don't trust closed code. Of course my software will have bugs, some of them serious. But I won't have stuff shutting down because of "license" issues. Why do people go quietly into enforced licenses? Why do people accept remote kill switches on their servers? Why doesn't this strike everyone as a crazy thing to do?

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[jason.stover]

Because they want someone they can call up and say, "Product X is broke. Fix it."

That's pretty much the main reason that I've ran into. A support contract being available.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[k-macjapan]

It's called passing the buck... aka C.Y.A.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Shados]

Because its an exceptional case. This particular one will hit a lot of people, but for the most part, most people have never had any issues with stuff like this. I know I never did.

And when that happen? Who cares, I'll just sue their asses, like I do whenever OTHER problems come up, and it works to recover losses, if its a bit of a pain in the ass (though usually they compensate you without having to go that far).

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Magic5Ball]

I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code

That must be a log of Open Source silicon. Oh, wait...

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Waffle Iron]

And when that happen? Who cares, I'll just sue their asses, like I do whenever OTHER problems come up, and it works to recover losses

No you won't. For essentially any software product available on today's market, during installation you agree to waive your rights to recover any losses beyond the purchase price.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Mikkeles]

So, how's it working for, say, VMWare EXS users?

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[julesh]

That must be a log of Open Source silicon. Oh, wait...

Why wait when open-source server processors are available now?

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Shados]

Yup, and in many places those clauses aren't valid. Even more so... when you buy corporate licenses for several douzen thousands of dollars of software... you do get someone to contact the company directly and sign a custom contract, yes? YES? RIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT?

No way in hell I'm purchasing 50000$ of licenses for whatever from Amazon.ca or some crap. If its mission critical, I get a contract that will state conditions. Worked fine so far (only for mission critical software, of course)

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[miffo.swe]

"Because they want someone they can call up and say, "Product X is broke. Fix it.""

In reality the most common answer to that sentence is that you should buy their next version. Fixing things is rarely an answer i get from any propriarity vendor support. Possibly youre told to try some stupid workarounds that doesnt fix the underlying issue at all. Some workarounds is so stupid that they just mitigate the problems, making it take longer time between fails instead of making them go away.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Tim C]

Well given that the bug only surfaced today, I'd say "so far so good".

Ask again in a day or so, but don't start flinging accusations when they've not had time to develop a patch, let alone QA and release it.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[jimicus]

Because they want someone they can call up and say, "Product X is broke. Fix it."

That's pretty much the main reason that I've ran into. A support contract being available.

In my experience, that's a bullshit reason trotted out by IT managers who have no faith in their own team and no experience of how most support contracts tend to pan out.

As far as the rest of the organisation is concerned, the person they call to say "Product X is broke. Fix it." is the IT department. How the IT department fixes it is of no consequence.

I've yet to see a support offering so good that you could reduce headcount in the IT support department, or for that matter an offering so good you could avoid hiring people who actually know what they're doing. So you certainly aren't saving in staffing costs. "We're waiting for vendor X to come back to us" may cut some ice in the early part of a major incident but it won't if the incident carries on for any significant length of time.

The only benefit I see is for commercial products whereby updates are only available to customers with a support contract.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Waffle Iron]

So you got one of their lawyers to approve a contract under which they assume liability for damages for only $50K? I find that hard to believe. And yet after all that negotiation, they still wouldn't provide you a dongle-free version. Hmm.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much the main reason that I've ran into. A support contract being available.

As you should really know by now, support contracts are available for FOSS.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Shados]

I'm keeping things simple since this is an internet forum/chat, not a whitepaper.

Its case by case basis. Different companies will deal with you differently. Microsoft will either give you copies that don't phone home, or let you have your own license server. Some companies will give you a version that doesn't expire, or scripts to bypass it.

-Many- will deal with you for liability exemptions.

It went the other way around many times. I've done business several times with companies (especially banks) that will not purchase any software or services from you if you do not have a liability contract with them AND have liability insurance. So if our software made them lose money (as defined in the contract), your insurance has to cover their loss. If you don't have it, they look elsewhere for their software.

Its very, very common.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[Angostura]

I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code.

I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but your business therefore "depends on the whims of someone else's IP policies and enforcement". I hope you don't do anything that breaks the terms of the GPL.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[RAMMS EIN]

Some people will stop at nothing to avoid running free (beer, freedom, or both) software. And if they discover it anywhere on their networks, they will attempt to have it removed.

I wish I were kidding.

Re:Yes, it is a bug

[blair1q]

In case you haven't noticed (and there's no way you haven't noticed), there is never an exact replica of a commercial product available in the open-source world. There are usually a couple of attempts at doing the same basic job, but there are always critical features that are unimplemented or implemented in such a way as to make them fail to saitsfy the buyer's business requirements.

You are willing to modify your business to work with the available features. That isn't a choice in real companies where changing one person's process causes a hundred or a thousand other people to have to be trained to deal with it.

VMWare Fusion is littered with bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought VMWare Fusion for my Mac shortly after it was released.

I've rarely seen such buggy commercial software. The VM engine itself is fine, but there are bugs galore in the GUI side of things.

Visit the VMWare Fusion "support" forum and virtually every posting is not asking how to do something, but is reporting a bug of some kind.

I think that VMWare staff ought to spend more time bug testing, and less time checking their stock tickers to see how well the company is doing.

Re:VMWare Fusion is littered with bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't yet, take a look at virtualbox.

Re:VMWare Fusion is littered with bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't yet, take a look at my ballsack.

VMWare's KB down

[Anonymous Coward]

"Temporary Maintenance - Knowledge Base

This section of the VMware website is currently unavailable while we make important user improvements and upgrades to the site. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

I hope it wasn't running on a VM.

Utility computing w/o virtualization

[MarkEst1973]

VMWare licenses for ESX server cost something like $5k apiece. My company uses VMWare and I don't quite get it. We pay for expensive blade hardware ($8k each for those, not to mention the chasis), then we pay $5k per virtual server. And for what? Adding virtualization overhead to the runtime cost.

Meanwhile, in articles like this, people are showing how to run many applications and different versions within a single container. A single node in the cluster can run any application. There are always busy, keeping the hardware fully utilized. Isn't that the promise of utility computing? Rack up a bunch of cheaper (but not cheap/shoddy) servers and let your cluster go to town.

So, my question is, why are we (as an industry) embracing virtualization when apps written for a smart container (like OSGi) give the same benefits without all the additional co$t and runtime overhead?

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[Cyberax]

Isolation and easy management.

Isolation of applications in OSGi containers is leaky, one bad-behaving application can bring down the whole containers.

Lightweight containers (OpenVZ, Virtuozzo) have almost no overhead and allow cool features like load-balancing of ALL applications between cluster nodes. However, all lightweight containers use the same kernel, and one kernel bug can bring down all virtual nodes.

XEN/KVM have a bit more overhead but with even more isolation (each node has its own kernel).

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[laffer1]

Simple, the industry goes through cycles. Virtualization is hot and some people love it. They want to run it even if there isn't a good reason for it. Some people mistakenly believe it improves security.

Virtualization is good for testing software and a few other cases where you need to run a different OS but don't want to deal with dedicated hardware or dual booting. I don't see any use in server environments except possibly web hosting.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple...power. Right now our datacenter is strapped for power, and power isn't cheap. Neither is cooling. For 10U and 8000 watts I can install a fully loaded blade chassis with 128 CPU cores and 1 Terabyte of RAM, attach it to a SAN and run 150 VMs in it. Or I can install 150 rack and stack servers at taking up 4 racks and 75000 watts. Let me think here...

And while I'm thinking about it, let's also remember that using VMWare gives you options like DRS and VMotion that you don't get with physical hardware. Or you can replicate your SAN to another SAN at your DR site and have a VMWare cluster waiting there for recovery. Then instead of having to do a bunch of restores to bare metal hardware, you could potentially get your servers back up and running in minutes instead of hours.

There are many, many benefits to virtualization. If there weren't then people wouldn't have been using for decades in one form or another.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[wisty]

Restart, recover. Reimage. Utility computing should be able to take a node going down. Heck, it should just about assume that rogue nodes are going to actively attack you. Otherwise you go down like Amazon when anything goes pear shaped. That is expensive, but so is all security.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[Kookus]

A neat thing about vmware is the ability for a "guest"/vm to migrate to different hardware during hardware failure.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[Cyberax]

How about load balancing then? It's fairly easy to move container applications between nodes.

Also, some applications may take a long time to restart.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

you do know that ESX is FREE now right?

http://www.virtualization.info/2008/07/vmware-to-release-esx-3i-for-free-next.html

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[drachenstern]

For much the same reason why I moved up to a single more expensive server. I can run my original SBS install now on any server that supports VMWare vm's instead of the failing POS that it had been installed on (before I adopted it, natch), and I can continually upgrade the underlying hardware without windows kvetching at me when I do. Plus, since the cost of hardware is much cheaper for one system than ten ($3500 for a low-end virtualization server, versus $600 apiece for six desktop boxes), I can run up to at least ten virtualized workstations and reuse my old boxes to simply connect to the vm using RDP or what have you, and seem to have a much faster network, without a massive outlay of funds for new hardware. Sure, we all want a new desktop, but really we just want to work. And nobody here has adopted dual screen computing besides myself, so...

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[T-Ranger]

I recognize OSGi as "some Java thing", but don't much really understand exactly its benefits. Well, thats not quite true, it vaguely seems to play the same kind of role as say the Linux standards base, plus package management. I know that is pretty high level, but its close enough.

And Java (the VM part) plays a relatively similar role as OS kernels; memory, device management, security, etc.

Well, you know what? We have very good systems in place for "container" standards, and device and memory management. We call them operating systems. And they have decades of tuning and optimization and management tools (and trained people) behind them. Despite the "just run this war" mentality of most/all Java people, it is never that simple. And since it usually "just works" for them, the documentation around installation, dependencies, and such is poor. Generally, culturally, either (configure;make;make install) or (rpm -Uvh ) "just works" more frequently then Java stuff.

As an example of this, just about all the Atlassian products (Jira, confluence, bamboo, etc) come in both "war" and "Standalone" versions, the later of which is packaged including Tomcat (or Jetty), because (apparently) documenting how to get a "drop in" war working in an existing tomcat install is just too difficult.

The Java paradigm may be theoretically better then historical OSs, but the reality that we live in is that Java hasn't delivered on this front.

Because all the various "easy" Java management stuff ultimately still requires a host OS - with its on management stuff - Java only adds to the burden.

We have a way of abstracting out hardware. And modern operating systems (distributions) have an excellent ways of managing applications.

Hardware virtualization technologies such as the ESX version of VMWare (or say, IBM 360s from 1965), which leverage hardware support (which mainframes do better then PC class stuff, I grant) is fundamentally better then putting a VM on top of an OS.

The overhead on modern hardware with virtualization capabilities is marginal. The additional ability to manage that hardware efficiently outweighs that overhead alone. Add to that the fault tolerance and resource balancing you can get with a cluster of real servers, and wow.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[peacefinder]

"VMWare licenses for ESX server cost something like $5k apiece."

That's an exaggeration by a factor of five. Admittedly it ain't cheap, but one can get three dual-processor (unlimited core) ESX licenses and a management software license for $2700, or just ESX server for $1000.

Of course, today it doesn't look real attractive...

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[yobtah]

You don't understand ESX licensing. The $5000 ESX license is for a VMWare host, not for a virtual machine inside. So you pay a total of $13000 for an ESX server that can host as many virtual servers as the hardware will handle. Also, blades are generally a bad idea as ESX hosts because you're putting all of your eggs in the one blade center basket. One of the main reasons to go with ESX is to get the ability to VMotion virtual servers to different ESX hosts in the cluster if one ESX server dies. You lose some fault tolerance if multiple ESX servers are in the same blade center.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[dotgain]

That's how it works in theory. In reality, the impact of snapshotting & replicating our VMs has been worse than simply shutting them down and copying the images - and we don't seem to be alone, google "esx snapshot hang". It turns out merging a 4 gig "delta" back into a Virtual machine can take hours and hours, with the VM seeming to be hung most of that time.

Implementing VMWare ESX went from one of the most exciting to the most annoying and disappointing project I've ever witnessed. As someone else has said, fortunatetly the hypervisor itself is quite stable, but most of the support apps are horrendous. VMWare Infrastructure Client is the slowest and most unreliable app I use. We've already lost one 200GiB virtual disk - the file was there but it refused to honour it as a "Virtual Disk" rather than "File". Good thing it was only a test server, but it's surely only a matter of time before we lose a production disk.

My prediction: In two years we'll look back on VMWare ESX, cringe at all the data-eating server-downing bugs we've found, wonder what all the fuss was about, and go back to *shock horror* running multiple services on single machines again, using operating systems capable of protecting one process from another.

Maybe I'm bitter and our project itself hasn't gone well, but I know I'm not alone. Not alone in wondering why my Linux PC at home with two SATA disks pisses all over our main fileserver who looks down a 4Gb FC at ten-disk 15kRPM Fibre Channel Stripe. Yes, it's an EMC SAN for those of you wondering quietly. One day, someone's going to cluster a bunch of old PowerMacs with USB/Firewire drives, software RAID, and show those EMC fuckers up.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[myxiplx]

Err... try again. VMware released ESX for free a few weeks ago. That fella's $5k estimate is looking more than a little out of date.

Re:Utility computing w/o virtualization

[peacefinder]

I believe that was the ESXi product, but yeah. (The price I quoted for the bundle was the price I paid in April.)

You!

[PJCRP]

Your licence has expired! You're not protected from dangerous internet threats! Renew your licence now and scan your computer...

VM Licence Management wants to squeeze a few more dollars out of you :U

"License management code..."

[John Hasler]

...Says it all, I think. Perhaps you should reconsider the ramifications of making your business critically dependent on software that contains code specifically design to make it stop working.

Consider this: to a proprietary vendor the only safe failure mode for "license management code" is one where everything stops.

Re:"License management code..."

[rlthomps-1]

Consider this: to a proprietary vendor the only safe failure mode for "license management code" is one where everything stops.

That's sooo not true. How is it "safe" for any company to have a bug like this? There's many very real costs that are associated with an incident of this magnitude, this very thread is an example of the brand being hurt and customer perceptions about reliability being changed. Do you think companies enjoy the bad press and fallout with customers over things like this?

Re:"License management code..."

[dotgain]

Unless the result of this "bad press and fallout" results in a complete change in how VMWare handle licensing, you've hardly rebutted the parent's point at all.

If they merely fix this particlar bug, I'd say he's got a point.

Patch Tuesday

[Thelasko]

FTFA:

VC will continue to show the hosts as licensed and no errors will appear in vmkernel log file until you try to start up a new vm, reboot a vm, or reboot the host.

Um, isn't today Patch Tuesday? This could be worse than we thought.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[prandal]

Rebooting a host doesn't power down the VM.

The licence checking is done at VM power up, apparently.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[fan of lem]

Come to think of it, the VMWare license server runs on Windows (only the ESX hosts themselves utilize Red Hat). Could everything boil down to being MS's fault? Oh how Slashdotters would love that.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[Thelasko]

It will be 3am in New Zealand in a few minutes. We should find out then.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[prandal]

Must check before posting next time. Rebooting a VM doesn't power down the VM.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh yeah, somehow the VM magically, heroically keeps running while the physical machine it is on dumps and reloads it's operating system. So you don't have to "power on" the guest virtual machine when the OS reloads, because it somehow heroically, magically kept right on running!

Re:Patch Tuesday

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure I understand why it is as bad as people make it out to be. Update 2 was release on 7/25 iirc, seems a bit quick to already have that in production?

On the notion of a bug...seems the code works exactly as intended. Just sayin.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[againjj]

Rebooting a host doesn't power down the VM.

The licence checking is done at VM power up, apparently.

Rebooting the host causes a problem according to TFA:

UPDATE 5: Apparently, there are no easily seen warnings in logs/etc or VC prior to hitting the bug. VC will continue to show the hosts as licensed and no errors will appear in vmkernel log file until you try to start up a new vm, reboot a vm, or reboot the host.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[Thelasko]

Rebooting a VM doesn't power down the VM.

That makes way more sense now. Taking it a step further: Rebooting the VM doesn't check the license. It only checks it if you do a complete shutdown and then try to start it again.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[McGiraf]

ESX does not run on windows.

License Management Server

[Comatose51]

Unless something has changed dramatically, an expired license won't bring down any already deployed VMs. It simply won't allow you to deploy undeployed ones. It doesn't shut down the VMs as the headline makes it sound nor is it a bug in the hypervisor. Yes it's embarrassing that this got out but can we have a less sensationalist headline and summary?

Re:License Management Server

[Slashcrap]

Unless something has changed dramatically, an expired license won't bring down any already deployed VMs. It simply won't allow you to deploy undeployed ones. It doesn't shut down the VMs as the headline makes it sound nor is it a bug in the hypervisor. Yes it's embarrassing that this got out but can we have a less sensationalist headline and summary?

No it just makes it impossible to start up VMs, restart VMs or VMotion them. I can't imagine why everyone's getting upset.

Yes, there's a workaround - you just put back the date on the server. Unless you're in a business where randomly changing the dates on servers is frowned upon for compliance reasons.

Re:License Management Server

[mrpolyrhythm]

You are correct: this is the same thing as if the License Server had gone down. After the 14 day grace period. So, worst case: you can't power on VM's, you can't add ESX hosts, you can't VMotion, DRS and HA won't work, etc. BUT, any powered on VMs will remain that way indefinately. Just don't power them off, or reboot them!

it has USB support

[reaktor]

Virtualbox has USB support...

Re:it has USB support

[wift]

Maybe stable support then. Each time I try adding a usb device virtualbox throws up it's hands and gives me an error.

Re:it has USB support

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That's nothing. When I tried it, it threw up an error and gave me its hands.

KVM and XEN

[kenp2002]

The Open Source Model gets a leg up again after this nonsense. A client of mine just ported all their VMs and said good bye to VMware. That's 280 VMs by the way. Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.

Management is pretty upset and I doubt we will be switching back any time soon to VMWare products after this.

On a side note this scenario did prove one thing:

Having a VM-agnostic storage makes migration easy. We changed a mount point, powered on the alternate VM host and we were off and running just that quick. We lost the ability to do live migrations for now but beyond that is was a good opporunity to see just how important an VM-agnostic disk storage array is. (I'm not the admin of those machines but I believe we are using iSCSI).

On my side though I had about 50 scripts tapping VMWare via PERL but I guess I can start building workarounds now... No more batch submission and dynamic routing for a week or two... The part I hate the most was I had a nice script to take a batch submission and if necessary migrate a utility node to bigger hardware to accomidate the batch... pisses me off but what can I do, thank you Vmware, that aquisition seems to be improving your product as much as when Symantec aquired Ghost Corp!

Re:KVM and XEN

[ToasterMonkey]

Having a VM-agnostic storage makes migration easy. [...clipped...] We lost the ability to do live migrations for now but beyond that is was a good opporunity to see just how important an VM-agnostic disk storage array is. (I'm not the admin of those machines but I believe we are using iSCSI).

Long time VMWare supporter, so I may be a bit biased, but..

First, live migrations are a very big f'ing deal to those who use that feature, not exactly something companies can just brush off easily.
What on Earth is VM-agnostic disk storage? Most storage is _platform_ agnostic... I've never heard of a storage system that depended on a particular VM system before. Are you referring to attaching storage directly to the guest VM's instead of through the host? NFS, Fibre Channel with NPIV, and iSCSI all allow for this. VMWare supports all of those, to the host, and to the guests. I'm willing to bet FOSS virtualization is limited to guest NFS and iSCSI, yes?

I've been keeping an eye on open source virtualization products, and some do look promising.
Some places sure should look at both commercial, and free(commercial disguised as such) products, but the high end of what VMWare on a real SAN can do is far, far off from what freeish virtualization can do. Let's be serious here, enterprise virtualization is NOT free any way you dice it.

I suppose if you're running 280 VM's over iSCSI you _would_ be a candidate for FOSS... don't read too far into that, it's not an insult.

Re:KVM and XEN

[Sir_Real]

I'm curious, are there any tools to help facilitate a migration from vmware to xen or kvm?

Re:KVM and XEN

[totally bogus dude]

First, live migrations are a very big f'ing deal to those who use that feature, not exactly something companies can just brush off easily.

What do you use live migrations for?

I do make use of this feature myself, but it's more a convenience thing than anything else. If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.

For an "enterprise" configuration the extra cost of VMware is just a drop in the bucket so probably worth paying for to get these "nice to have" features, but it's hard to see its absence as a show-stopper. Then again, you may have a use case I haven't considered.

Re:KVM and XEN

[kenp2002]

I checked with Travis (The admin) they mount the disks as raw devices so it was just a matter of creating a VM in the alternate VM host and pointing to the old disk, you still have to go in and add various tools and switch some NIC information (he said that all he had to do was let the system detect a new NIC, remove the old one, and set the new NIC to the same MAC then reboot.)

Re:KVM and XEN

[zyzko]

Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.

May I ask what you migrated to? Disk storage is nearly always "vm-agnostic" but how did you migrate your vmware guest images to another platform and what would that be? If you mean that you had alternative guest VMs ready and the data was just in NFS / iSCSI mounts then I undestand, but that means building the base systems twice, and double maintenance to keep them in sync.

I'm not justifying this for vmware - they screwed it bad this time, and I got bitten by this as well (luckily only one development host was upgraded to 3.5u2, our production was still at earlier 3.5 which did not suffer from this).

Re:KVM and XEN

[zyzko]

If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.

vmotion exactly saves you from host failure - if you have enough spare resources available in your cluster. Also live migration isn't exactly instant but it is "nearly instant enough" for many cases, and definitely better than manual alternatives. If you need truly disaster-proof setup which must preserve network connections and have absolutely no effect on ongoing service if any device dies you are looking at much more expensive setup than "basic" vmotion. But for us that require that in case of hardware failure guest moves to working hadware in matter of (tens) seconds and doesn't cause outages if resources (network, cpu, ram) are available vmotion can actually be quite cheap and simple compared to building a cluster setup.

Operator errir is a different thing of course - and there lies the power of application clustering.

Re:KVM and XEN

[totally bogus dude]

Okay now I see - this actually has nothing to do with VMotion, which deals with migrating guests between hosts while they're running (or while they're stopped, but that's not as cool). Automatically (re)starting guests is managed by the "High Availability" part of VI. I guess you also have a slightly different definition of "outage" to me as well, as I consider turnin a server off and then back on to result in an "outage", albeit a short one.

It's also nothing that can't be done under any other virtualisation system, provided you have shared storage so that another host can actually restart the guest. To me this seems like one of the least amazing parts of VMware's offerings, in that it's an entirely expected thing for the system to be able to do.

Re:KVM and XEN

[kenp2002]

The high availability stuff was switched to Microshaft's VM and dev boxes were switched to Xen as the VM provider. I know my two script boxes ended up as KVM driven but that was by my request for testing (my stuff is just perl scripts that execute as a reporting system and until I get my VMware scripts re-coded for Xen and KVM they won't be used much.)

Again I didn't do the switch over myself and I won't get an enterprise infrastructure map until month-end so I can be certain what got switched to what. I am currently on vacation and won't be in to that client till the 2nd weekend of Sept.

Yes they were just disk mounts so it wasn't too painful.

Crippled by design

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugs happen. What's so sad about this one, is that it's happening in some code that exists for no reason other than to harm their own customers. (Remember: pirates don't run the license-checking code.) If the intent of the code is to make the software fail, and there is a bug in that code that makes the software fail, then this borders more on malware rather than a mere bug, even though it was caused by an 'innocent'? mistake. If I were a VMWare customer, I would be furious.

misleading headline

[andrew.hill]

Nothing gets "Shut Down". You can't power on VMs, use vmotion, or DRS.

I'd post this comment...

[gparent]

But I'll have to wait tomorrow, as I'm on VMWare =(

I've got a fix that will be available sooner...

[Hel Toupee]

I would imagine that a fix would be available in less than 24 hours... you know... wait and start your processes tomorrow? Still sucks. I'm glad I didn't bother to keep my stuff completely up-to-date.

Re:I've got a fix that will be available sooner...

[Rub1cnt]

Anyone ever consider that the reason for the delay may be that VMware is presently in panic mode due to the effect of the bug at the corp offices? Never know..

It's days like this...

[AcquaCow]

I'm glad that I keep true to the old methods and run a full version behind.

I'm running 3.0.1 just about everywhere and am unaffected by this bug. I work in a prototyping lab and being able to clone and boot up new VMs is a way of life.

No money wasted today =)

  -- Dave

Re:It's days like this...

[r_newman]

I'm glad that I keep true to the old methods and run a full version behind.

I'm running 3.0.1 just about everywhere and am unaffected by this bug. I work in a prototyping lab and being able to clone and boot up new VMs is a way of life.

No money wasted today =)

  -- Dave

Actually, you are running more than a full version behind. If you're on the 3.0.x tree, you should be on at least 3.0.2. There are far too many old issues waiting to bite you in the ass with 3.0.1. I believe that 3.0.3 was released recently too, and it doesn't suffer from the expiry cock-up in the 3.5.0 update 2 release.

What if you can't even trust your compiler?

[camperdave]

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf

What if you can't even trust your compiler? At some point, even with fully open, GPL-compliant software, there is some point you just have to trust someone else to not jack you.

That is an excellent paper. If you have not read it, please do.

I was thinking about the very problem of trusting your compiler, and the only thing I could come up with is building one from an open assembler. You would need a single (very public) file containing the base executable. This could be small enough that it could be hand disassembled and verified with a hex dump on any system. You would then feed it a table of menmonics and the equivalent instructions, followed by the code for a more powerful compiler. Since all that would be open source, you could build a system that could be verified. (There could be versions of the initial assembler made for different computers, so you could build your base compiler on, say, an Atari 600XL, or a Commodore 64.)

Re:What if you can't even trust your compiler?

[JulianoR]

This could be small enough that it could be hand disassembled and verified with a hex dump on any system.

What if the disassembler and the hexdump utility were "infected" too?

Re:What if you can't even trust your compiler?

[Xtifr]

I was thinking about the very problem of trusting your compiler, and the only thing I could come up with is building one from an open assembler.

I built gcc (1.4) with a C interpreter. It was slow as hell (and we did it mainly to stress-test the interpreter), but when I fed the source of gcc to the result, it did what I expected--built a system the same as the one that regular gcc built.

But the simple fact of the matter is that a little common sense should reveal that the whole notion is impossible in the real world. At the time Thompson wrote, there was, basically, one C compiler and one version of login, and neither one changed very much, so it was at least theoretically possible for a fairly simple program to recognize them. The sources to gcc have changed too much over the years to be recognizable to anything less than a hard-AI system, i.e., something that doesn't exist (and if it did, you'd notice, since it would take hours to compile even the simplest app). Toss in drastically different compilers from vendors like Sun, IBM, Intel and HP, and the whole thing becomes even more ridiculous. But if you really want to check, write your compiler in another language (one that doesn't compile to assembler, like Java or Python).

Re:What if you can't even trust your compiler?

[camperdave]

What if the disassembler and the hexdump utility were "infected" too?

That's why I said "on any system". The hex dump could be done on a mac, or a windows XP system, or a BSD machine, or a palm pilot. They should all dump the same hex. As far as infecting a hand disassembly... Well, if they can do that, we're screwed no matter what we do.

No! Don't set the time back!

[Animats]

VMware is suggesting setting the system time backwards to work around their license manager problem. That's a desperation move. Not only will it mess up everything from Kerberos to CVS to "make", if you're running certain licensed software, in particular software licensed via FlexLM, that software will stop working. FlexLM will disable your licenses if the clock goes backwards by more than 24 hours. Now your expensive high-end software protected by FlexLM (Rational, Avid, Matlab, National Instruments, ANSYS, Cisco Unity, Clearcase, Nokia network management, etc.) will stop working. Setting the clock forward again may not re-enable it, either; there's tamper detection.

Also, if you have server/client licensing with FlexLM, or multiple license servers, and the clocks disagree significantly, FlexLM gets suspicious and turns licenses off.

Re:No! Don't set the time back!

[IgnoramusMaximus]

The amusing part of course is that Vmware licensing server .... is a FlexLM server (which takes some vendor-specific plug-ins, which is how it can serve many applications).

As people have pointed out, many (sane) corps refuse to play ball with any software which requires anything remotely resembling the FlexLM licensing shit. Unfortunately sometimes there is no other choice ... and sooner or later we are painfully taught that DRM is a method of turning the supposedly "legitimate" customers into masochists.

The sooner some Free Software equivalent of all the advanced VMware features shows up, the sooner we can leave the FlexLM people to gainfully employ their product to repeatedly insert and remove it from their hind orifices with high frequency.

Re:No! Don't set the time back!

[Sylver Dragon]

Yup, if it finds future files on your system, FlexLM goes nuts. Only fix I have found so far was to write a custom app to go through my system and touch every file with a future date. Messy, but it beats the other given solution of: reload your system.

Re:No! Don't set the time back!

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong. Time skew on VMS only goes one way - forwards. They'll update if they find themselves behind the host clock, but NOT if they're ahead of it. The VMs, minus a domain controller, can function fine with the time not matching with the hardware clock, since most of them are totally oblivious to it.

Nice..

[Cyberfed]

Too bad I found out about this bug in the morning before I got to slashdot. Could have saved me some googling

Re:Nice..

[hany]

You know that you should read ./ before you do any actual work. Don't you?

:)

Re:Nice..

[X0563511]

And while you should be working. And after you should have worked...

Re:Nice..

[shish]

You know that you should read ./ before you do any actual work. Don't you?

Indeed; and I recommend getting into the habit of *double* checking the current working directory before running something like "rm -rf *" ;)

Misleading summary: bug DOES NOT shut down systems

[fgaliegue]

However, it disallows powering on VMs and using VMotion (I guess HA fails too).

And note also that previous ESX versions are NOT affected. My cluster still runs 3.5u1 and doesn't have this problem.

Only in an ideal world

[Len]

In a major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating your software.

Sadly, not true in the real world, as my company has discovered on more than one occasion.

/w is common and has been since the 1860s

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it w/ or w/o.

I take it you are a natural born whiner-.

NOT the *OpenSource Edition*

[DrYak]

Support for USB, iSCSI and RDP (along with USB-over-RDP) are only available in the closed source variants of VirtualBox.
The opensource edition of Virtual Box doesn't have them.

Also the USB support may lock the system when in fast emulation/patching/ring-2 mode, and only works flawlessly when using the slower mode with virtualisation CPU extensions (my brother tried using it to get old USB hardware accessible when moving to Vista 64 but since then he ended up buying newer hardware)

works better with CPU extensions

[DrYak]

Each time I try adding a usb device virtualbox throws up it's hands and gives me an error.

I had more success when using the CPU virtualization extension (you have to both enable them in VirtualBox's preferences screen and on the virtual machine's properties). But beware this mode is much slower than the original emulation/patching/ring-2 mode.

work is in progress....

[DrYak]

If a virtual machine would support something like DirectX or OpenGL so that I could have the kids running their games in a virtual machine (and being able to install them, etc.) I would have them set up with a locked down OS with a virtual system for their games. {...} But I'm sure the technology is getting closer.

Yup. Indeed. /. mentioned recently "VMGL".
The extension is open source but currently only works for X11 OSes at both end.
But as you said, a working acceleration layer is bound to be developed in the near future for Windows too.

Mission-critical apps on licence-driven system?

[TheDarkMaster]

Mission-critical software on licence-driven systems? Houston, whe have a problem! whe ha... *radio noise*

Sticking with Windows 2000

[argent]

That's why I stuck with Windows 2000, because I expected to see this kind of thing show up in an update to XP. I'm surprised that Microsoft waited until Vista before turning on the full malware-in-the-kernel option.

Combine this with the loss of customer data in "The LinkUp" and the recent announced termination of Yahoo's "Plays-for-Sure" (or is that "Plays-for-Now"?) servers, and it should make everyone think twice about depending on licenses supported by suicide switches and strong DRM.

PS: don't forget to "MIX-BURN-RIP" your iTunes tracks when you buy 'em.

New operations only

[r_newman]

Anyone running a production environment who upgraded to ESX 3.5.0 update 2, released July 25th is impacted by this IF they are firing up new VMs, doing a live migration of a VM etc. If they want to continue to use the services provided by their running VMs however, they will not be affected by this issue. There is a 14-day leeway for running VM processes when a license expires. As VMware are going to release a fix within 36 hours, that's well covered. Planned maintenance may need to be pushed back though for example, which is about the extent of the impact. It's a nasty little issue, the impact of which has been blown out of all proportion by some posters here who prefer to evangelise for Xen, or even for Microsoft.

I Am So Dead

[Hasai]

*sigh*

Well, it's for real. I've confirmed it here, and my whole data center is affected.

It's time like this when I wish I hadn't left the Army; at least there, you can shoot back.

This is going to be one hell of a long night. :(

The worst offender is Wolfram

[maynard]

I like Mathematica. It's a wonderful tool. But dealing with Wolfram's insane licensing requirements costs our group significant money in wasted staff time and repeat relicensing. Every year we have to update license keys for the FlexLM server.

FlexLM - that should have died with Interleaf long long ago.

I'm glad my company went with Hyper-V.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have this not so fresh feeling touting the virtues of VMWare's competition, Hyper-V.

One of the things I did in the place I worked was use Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V instead of ESX for a virtualization platform. Its not production yet, but it likely will be in a couple months, as test VMs get signed off by devs and the brass after stress tests.

One of the bigger fears was the fact that VMWare's licensing could shut off a mission critical VM that physically resides on three boxes that are connected to the same SAN. With Windows Server 2008, should it fall out of licensing, it would gripe at you, and turn the desktop black. Whoopty-do. This doesn't affect production in the slightest.

Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V has the same functionality, allowing a virtual machine to be on a redundant cluster, assuming all the machines in the cluster can see the same SAN volumes. No, it doesn't have the bells and whistles as ESX, and it requires the CPU to have VM support but it works remarkably well.

Ironically, I have a really cheap Dell laptop running Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, and it is more than capable of running my Linux stuff at near native speeds.

Hyper-V's cost? Free. When my company did a hardware refresh, Windows Server 2008 was included in the package.

Oh... it runs Linux perfectly. VirtualPC needed to have the "noreplace-paravirt" command line entry, but Hyper-V not just runs RedHat, but runs it without any problems.

Hyper-V's disadvantage? You have to have the hardware support in the motherboard and CPU, and you need Windows Server 2008, which starts at $1000.

License management software is a liability

[OrangeTide]

I have seen this happen so many times. These commercial software packages that require a license manager are a liability. They are a serious design flaw that makes commercial software less desirable, and opens up one more opportunity for open source software to compete.

ps - Well I'd run ESX over Server, because it's much faster and can do real SMP virtualization. But I'm also willing to dedicate a machine and buy compatible hardware. But most people wouldn't go through the hassle I bet.

Hmmmm. Another Reason to Wait for KVM

[segedunum]

I've been weighing up whether to migrate from VMware Server for our limited set of operations and move to ESXi and then ESX. This has made up my mind now. I'd rather wait for the hype of virtualisation to really settle down, use it in a pretty limited capacity and then run more stuff on technology and a host system that gets it right - KVM and Linux. I don't care too much about waiting, because as far as I'm concerned this just isn't acceptable. Many organisations will be brought to their knees by something like this, and over something that is totally unnecessary as well. I could understand pretty much any other issue, but not this. Sorry VMware.

Re:Hmmmm. Another Reason to Wait for KVM

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather wait for the hype of virtualisation to really settle down

There are real, valid, reasons to virtualize, right now. It's not really in a hype phase at the moment. In fact, isn't it kind of old now? Where have you been?

use it in a pretty limited capacity and then run more stuff on technology and a host system that gets it right - KVM and Linux.

Simply stunning... good luck with that!

Many organisations will be brought to their knees by something like this, and over something that is totally unnecessary as well.

I'm sure we'll read all about it tomorrow, of teh horror! Or maybe we won't. BTW, this only affects VM's that are turned off, or migrated, still bad, but not the unholy terror the summary would have you believe.

I've been weighing up whether to migrate from VMware Server for our limited set of operations and move to ESXi and then ESX.

You probably don't need the features of ESX. When you switch to KVM, don't forget to keep saying that over and over.

BTW, it doesn't make sense that ESX would follow ESXi. If you ever really DID intend on evaluating ESX, you should figure out the ESX/ESXi distinction first.

Re:Hmmmm. Another Reason to Wait for KVM

[myxiplx]

Personally I've no problems with VMware. To me this smacks of the old rule "don't run mission critical servers on software under 6 months old". Deploying a 2 week old fix to live servers is just asking for trouble. I like to let other people find my bugs thanks.

Bad company

[PingPongBoy]

but if I don't know what the hole looks like, I can't carve a peg to fit it

There are some I know who will put their pegs into any hole

Re:Bad company

[Anonymous Coward]

LIke this guy?

(film at 11)

Hypervisor (host) time != VM (guest) time

[nutznboltz]

Just run NTP inside the guest Virtual Machines. Also turn off VMware tools time sync in each VM guest under "edit setting" -> "options", etc.

Nothing like CVS or FlexLM will break.

You probably can do this without any downtime. Try vmware-toolbox to change the VMware tools time sync option online.

Sometimes you really should RTFA

[comment()]

This is really depressing. The parent is totally wrong - changing the time on the ESX host will _not_ affect the clocks of the guests, provided you go back in time on the host rather than forward.
Yet the parent is modded +5 Informative as I speak, and replies pointing out the wrongness of his statement do not even show up when browsing at the default threshold.

You have to also mention Countering Trusting Trust

[Sits]

How can you reference Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (HTML/non-PDF version) without also mentioning David A. Wheeler's "Countering Trusting Trust" (as found via Bruce Schneier's blog)? So to answer your question:

What if you can't even trust your compiler?

Well so long as I have another set of compilers AND at least one is trustworthy then there is process I can follow to build a compiler I can trust. After spotting differences in the resulting binary I would also need to (ah-ha) examine the source code of the used compilers and find out which one is mis-generating the binary and fix it.

At some point I need to be able to understand binary and read the source of the compiler that generated that binary to ensure that someone else is not jacking me.

so many systems

[bugs2squash]

Maybe part of the problem is that each vendor implements license management independently. If there were just a handful of license managing vendors (like the big Certificate Authorities) that all agreed to manage licensing in the same way, there would be solid support across many platforms to make it happen and fewer places for an IT manager to call to collect compliance information. Maybe even automated compliance management tools for the IT admin etc.

License management might even be of interest to open source projects (to get uptake stats, embedding information and usage information for example).

Surely someone can think up an open scheme.

Re:so many systems

[j_sp_r]

Like, for example, FlexLM?

Re:so many systems

[bugs2squash]

I don't know much about FlexLM, but from the wikipedia page it sounds more like an application than a service. I was thinking more of a service for verifying licenses in real time - rather like paypal or a credit card company verifies a credit card transaction.

Maybe it would go something like this...

An application on the internet would check in with the license management service periodically while it is being used. The license manager would issue digitally signed permission to use the application in specific ways, provided that it was within the license terms and record the fact that it was being used.

The application would not be duped into accepting this permission because it used PKI to verify that the license manager was what it what it said it was. The application could probably check in at any number of license servers in case there was an outage at one provider. As long as the license services synchronize their records of what's in play and what's allowed, then there should be very little opportunity to cheat.

Application vendors and IT Managers could pull reports from any provider to find out what has been used and when. Without connectivity to one of the license service providers, the application will only work in some restrictive way (eg. allow you to save work in progress and quit)

I'm sure that there's nothing new in what I describe, except that I don't know of anyone hosting a licence manager as a service, or of any commonly agreed protocols for doing so.

Sometimes you really should read the manual

[Animats]

"The parent is totally wrong - changing the time on the ESX host will _not_ affect the clocks of the guests, provided you go back in time on the host rather than forward."

This depends on configuration and reboot time. See this 25-page paper on how VMware timekeeping works. The default is that when the VMware host OS is booted, it reads the hardware CMOS time of day clock, the host OS keeps time from that point, and the current host time is exported to the client operating systems via the emulated CMOS time of day clock as they boot in virtual machines.

This default behavior can be modified. You can specify offsets between the host clock and the client clocks. You can change the host clock without changing the client clocks. You can run clock synchronization programs in the clients, and these can sync to some external time source. (NNTP tends to get unhappy because the simulated clock it sees isn't running at a constant speed.) VMWare offers client-side synchronization tools for Windows and Linux, and those won't set the client OS clock backwards during operation. During reboot of a VM, though, if the host time was set backwards, the client times will by default be reset on the next boot. It's possible to configure around this and have explicit clock offsets.

But if you just set the host CPU clock back, things are only OK until the next host reboot. Then everything resyncs to the bogus time.

Remember that in the original article, the issue is about host reboots. If the host doesn't reboot, you're OK with VMware licensing. If it does, then the trouble starts.

Sounds Like It....

[maz2331]

but...

If you actually know what you are doing, Access is actually a pretty good development platform. It really is what VB should have been all along. Doing it correctly isn't for the faint of heart nor the inexperienced "guy who knows computers in the department" developer though. It's a LOT of work.

The biggest issue is that MS markets it as a database app, not a dev platform.

But there are some caveats to its use.

1. Never bind controls that can be edited to any datasource. Sorry, but you really need to write code to fill them in, check them, then write them to the back end.

2. Never store any data in an MDB file. Always use a real backend server such as MSSQL, Oracle, or even Postgres or MySQL.

3. Once it works, create an MDE file and only run MDEs on clients, never the "source" MDB.

4. You are checking your db schema revision and comparing it to allowed client app revisions, right?

Still, there are newer platforms available, and quite often a web-based app will be easier to build and maintain.

Set DRS Cluster to Manual

[mrpolyrhythm]

The article also says that he'd recommend disabling DRS because that would remove resource pools, and goes on to say set the sensitivity to 5. What would be the more correct course of action, would be to set your DRS Cluster to Manual, which is indicating no automation, DRS will not place or move VMs.

artifical dependencies

[King_TJ]

Yep, absolutely right! I'm constantly frustrated by the "Pronest" software our company uses. We purchased a "floating license" for it, where the client checks in with the license manager on a server to "take" the available license for only as long as it's running on a particular workstation.

Ok in theory, but in practice, a nightmare! I've had PCs that run into all sorts of problems where they can't communicate with the license server, so the app won't start. The "tech support FAQ" just recommends making sure the Crypkey service is running, and to re-register a bunch of .DLL files if it won't start. That only solved the problem for me in ONE instance.

It now looks like the license file itself on the server got damaged somehow, and NONE of the PCs will authorize against it. This is going to be a HUGE hassle, because the makers of this software make you jump through all sorts of hoops to request a new license key - especially for a "floating" network license.

Corporate version of Windows

[Futurepower(R)]

He's talking about the corporate version of Windows, which only requires a license serial number.

Re:Corporate version of Windows

[harl]

Yes he is. But the complaints he lists at the top don't apply to to MS, which he just throws in at the end.

Official Email

[mrsuge]

Here is an email I just got from VMware

Dear VMware Customers,

Please find the latest update about the product expiration issue. From this point on, weâ(TM)ll provide an update every two hours. Thanks.

Problem:

An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.

Affected Products:

* VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2
* Reports of problems with ESX 3.5 U1 with the following 3.5 Update 2 patch applied.
1. ESX350-200806201-UG
* No other VMware products are affected.

What has been done?

* Product and Web teams pulled the ESX 3.5 Update 2 bits from the download pages last night so no more customers will be able to download the broken build.
* VMware Engineering teams have isolated the cause of the problem and are working around the clock to deliver updated builds and patches for impacted customers.
* A Knowledgebase article has been published (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006716), but traffic to the knowledgebase is causing time outs. A new static page has been published at http://www.vmware.com/support/esx35u2_supportalert.html that customers and partners will be able to view.
* The phone system has been updated to advise customers of the problem
* Vmware partners have been notified of the issue.

Workarounds:

1. Do not install ESX 3.5 U2 if it has been downloaded from VMwareâ(TM)s website or elsewhere prior to August 12, 2008.
2. Set the host time to a date prior to August 12, 2008. This workaround has a number of very serious side affects that could impact product environments. Any Virtual Machines that sync time with the ESX host and serve time sensitive applications would be broken. These include, but are not limited to database servers, mail servers, & domain administration systems.

Next Steps:
VMware to notify customers who have downloaded this version and provide an update every two hours.

Resolution:

VMware Engineering has isolated the root cause and is working to produce an express patch for impacted customers today. The target timeframe is 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST.

FAQ:

1. What would this express patch do?

More information will be provided in subsequent communication updates.

2. Will VMware still reissue the upgrade media and patch bundles in the timeframe that has been communicated?

Yes. We still plan to reissue upgrade media by 6pm, August 13 PST (instead of noon, August 13 PST) and all update patch bundles later in the week. We will provide an ETA for the update patch bundles subsequently. NOTE: the "patch bundles" referred to here are for the patches listed above under "Affected Products" and the other bundles released at GA. They are not the same as the express patch which is targeted for 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST as stated above.

3. Why does VMware plan to reissue the upgrade media before the patch bundles? That is a wrong priority call!

This is not a matter of priority. Since we can get done building and testing the upgrade media before the patch bundles, we want to make that available to customers first instead of

They got to get rid of that crap

[tuaris]

Software vendors need to get over it and realize that all this licensing crap does nothing except make things complicated and cause things to break. It does absolutely nothing to prevent piracy, and probably costs them 10 times as more to design and implement that trash than to just allow the product to be pirated.

Small confidence?

[symbolset]

If nothing else, it gives you some confidence that you will pass an audit.

What gives me confidence from software is knowing that it will do what I tell it to do without asking for permission from somebody else. I don't expect that from people, but when it comes to software and hardware I'm a control freak that way. Perhaps there's a treatment plan for this.

Engineering in a deliberate "don't work under certain conditions" case is a first order design flaw as evidenced by this article, the Windows Genuine Advantage validator fiasco and the maintenance headaches faced by users of ESRI software among many others. It's hard enough to get rid of those type of issues that are accidentally introduced. There's no way I'd submit to one added deliberately as a "feature". But then I guess I'm lucky not to have to do the jobs those products serve so well.

Your IT department has epically failed

[ScottCooperDotNet]

...And as far as everyone else in the business is concerned, any failings in the product is the IT department's problem not theirs.

Of course, the sales droid said it was the perfect app. We suits couldn't have been duped, could we? No one wants to admit to that, because then IT would have a say over their precious domain.

This is a Visual Basic application that if I'm being kind I'd say is a kludge held together by the electronic equivalent of duct tape and glue. The thing is junk and crashes ALL THE TIME. IT didn't pick this app though - we just get stuck supporting it. However, no amount of explanation can convince these people that the program crashing is not IT's fault. ...
But the basic fact is the program you bought is crap and full of bugs and nothing IT does is going to make it stop crashing and screwing up data.

Sadly, this is a hard fact to make users accept.

Then whomever is running your IT department isn't doing their job. Wouldn't you complain to your Telecom folks if your phone randomly dropped calls constantly? In your case, it sounds like IT is, at some level, to blame for the mess. Was IT in on the purchasing process? Did IT do any beta testing? Parallel testing? Who came up with the cost-to-support for the new app?

Re:Your IT department has epically failed

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite often these things appear outside the department and you get forced into a corner. We have an application, but we pushed it into the naughty corner, it has the lowest resource share and gave the guy in charge of the app the ability to restart the machine when required. All support has been diverted to the company they bough it off. We get the occasional call to kill a terminal session but essentially we wiped our hands of it. We had to get senior management on board, but that was easy when we showed them the stats on support times and how it affected major projects, major projects that were holding back the business because they weren't complete.

So the point I'm trying to make is, that it is easy to point the finger, but unless you know all the details as to why you will potentially be pointing in the wrong direction.

Re:Your IT department has epically failed

[MBGMorden]

Then whomever is running your IT department isn't doing their job. Wouldn't you complain to your Telecom folks if your phone randomly dropped calls constantly? In your case, it sounds like IT is, at some level, to blame for the mess. Was IT in on the purchasing process? Did IT do any beta testing? Parallel testing? Who came up with the cost-to-support for the new app?

Government organizations don't work like that. Departments will put out an RFP, pick out, and buy something, and we may or may not have any say (or even knowledge) regarding it. Regardless though, we have to support it. In this case, we did do both parallel testing and "best testing", in that we ran the two programs concurrently for almost 18 months during the conversion phase before users went live on the new system - we let them know the whole time that there were problems with the new system but that's pretty much the the original point :). During that time I also submitted countless bug reports to the vendor that wrote the software, but they pretty much shrugged them off; almost acted as if I was being picky when I pointed out things that would make the software crash.

Cost to support isn't something that gets done in our type of environment. As said, it's government. Once an elected official gets it in their head to buy something they generally buy it and IT (which is a fixed cost to the organization overall so they don't really care about the man hours we invest) has to support it.

Re:Your IT department has epically failed

[VdG]

A slight digression, but how many people do serious testing of software against different dates?

I did a lot about 10 years ago, but none since. Back when I was a developer, I don't recall doing any full-scale tests with future dates, (just simple stuff to check particular chunks of code). Of course, I was just an in-house programmer, not producing anything to be sold to other companies.

How would you go about doing such testing? For Y2K we had some specific target dates so we could just reset the clock to a bit before each one and see what happened. It'd be really tough - and time consuming - to test every possible date from now until the product goes out of support.

Re:Your IT department has epically failed

[Shadow99_1]

Personally I get handed software as the network admin for a charter school district and told this will be new software used immediately by all staff, sans training, testing, or any prior knowledge.

I doubt I'm at the only place where this happens...

The GP is also correct.

[symbolset]

A supplier of Free Software can never be sure that someone he doesn't even know about let alone control will decide to review his source code.

The GP is correct. You have to trust others to not jack you.

The GP is also correct. In a wide world a piece of software that becomes popular will be audited, if for no other reason than the government agency adopting it requires it. As soon as it's discovered to be nefarious (which, think about it ... it almost never happens) it will be publicized and everybody will drop it like a hot rock.

I'm not disagreeing with you either. At some point you have to trust others not to jack you. Open fans prefer to push that down to the hardware level as frequently as possible. Sometimes software vendors need to trust you not to jack them too. Like the vendor in this fine article. They should have exercised some trust when considering whether or not to build in a retarded kill switch that might misfire and destroy the (absolutely mandatory for the product) reliability reputation of their brand in the marketplace. Now for six months we have to listen to the "VMWare is dead" flamewar because they couldn't lighten up about their preccciousssss.

Re:The GP is also correct.

[symbolset]

Now for six months we have to listen to the "VMWare is dead" flamewar because they couldn't lighten up about their preccciousssss.

And so it begins.

GNU vs VMWare

[supernova_hq]

So, slashdot voting time!

Who wins epic fail of the year?
1) GNU (Encryption Bug)
2) VMWare (License Bug)

Patch Available

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/dynamickc.do?externalId=1006721&sliceId=1&command=show&forward=nonthreadedKC&kcId=1006721

-Gilson Soares

informative

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Is this office based in Neverland ?

[freaker_TuC]

Michael Jackson, is that you?

Oh no!

[greenlead]

It's Y2K all over again! :-D

The complaint applies to the version of Windows...

[Futurepower(R)]

The complaint applies to the version of Windows most people have.

A VERY nice feature of Free, Open Source Software is that there are no license hassles.

Another VERY nice feature is that the software is not designed in such a way as to trick the user into paying more. There are 7? versions of Vista: Vista Starter*, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Vista Enterprise. That's 6, but I think there is one more. And they are all not a new operating system, but just a new version of Windows XP.

And, even worse --> Windows XP was a huge, huge hassle for three years, until Service Pack 2 was released.

Uglier still --> --> Then, after only 3 relatively good years, Microsoft announced that it had declared the death of Windows XP!!!

More sheer ugliness: There are operating system files that the operating system won't copy, making backups a big hassle. There is the sloppiness which makes software be self-degrading and very vulnerable to attack, which helps the vendor sell more copies, because people throw away the corrupted computers and buy new ones, therefore paying for a new copy of the operating system. Another abuse: Microsoft drones attended OSCON, trying to infiltrate the Open Source Convention to sell things that require payment in more than money, in acceptance of abuse, also. There is making new versions that require far more powerful hardware, so that customers will require new computers, making it more profitable for hardware vendors, who then accept that they are being abused in other ways.

It's when you catalog ALL the abuses of commercial software vendors that it become obvious that it is good to avoid them if at all possible. Not all of Microsoft's abuses are cataloged here, of course.

(*Note from Microsoft: Windows Vista Starter is not currently scheduled to be available in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, or other high income markets as defined by the World Bank.)

Quick fix

[mudgie]

Go to the VMWare infrastructure client and set the system date to 8/1/08. Make sure you disable NTP at the same time!

Re:The complaint applies to the version of Windows

[harl]

"The complaint applies to the version of Windows most people have."

That's nice but not what we are talking about.

Regardless of the accuracy the rest of your post is offtopic fanboi ranting and thus I won't respond to it.

Designed to break

[YoungHack]

This drives me nuts with every non-Free piece of software I administer. Software breaks often enough, thank you very much, because it is inherently complex. But software with a license server is "designed to break." A license server is just a hair trigger that breaks your software whenever anything isn't "just right."

Re:The complaint applies to the version of Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you work for Microsoft?

Whatever happened to builds run by non-idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean how about
$ make EXPIRE=`date $BOMBDATE` world

and

#ifdef EXPIRE // don't do stuff
#endif

and for non-beta builds you omit the parameter? Talk about fscking idiots on the part of the programmers and build masters to NOT have something this simple implemented.

Another damned licence manager

[sjames]

I've found that apps that employ license management are by far more likely to fail than those that don't and most of the failures are due to the license management screwing up.

Of course, that's to be expected when software is actually designed so that the default state is failure.

It's really offensive to have software accusing me of being a thief when, in fact, it is the thief (that is, I paid my money and now it refuses to provide the functionality. It won't work again until it has stolen my time). Whatever genius included license management should be made available to receive a punch (a natural consequence of making unfounded vile accusations) in the nose from each and every person inconvenienced by being called a thief.

It might just make the people who will be ripping their hair out supporting this crap feel a bit better.