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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.
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.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Um, isn't today Patch Tuesday? This could be worse than we thought.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
Troubleshooting that one was fun.
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!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
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.