VMware apologizes for ESX bug

Paul Mah — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:41:16 -0400

Users who have updated to the latest version of VMware's flagship ESX product found themselves in a quandary when they could not power up their virtual servers earlier this week. The culprit proved to be leftover code from beta versions that slipped in through the most recent update in late-July.

Implemented in order to better control beta releases, the "time bomb" code was designed to stop the virtual machines from being powered up past a certain date, which in this case was August 12. The company has since issued a patch that allowed enterprises to start up affected virtual servers, with VMware CEO Paul Maritz apologizing for the "disruption and difficulty" in an open letter.

For more about the VMware ESX snafus:
- check out this Computerworld article

Sanbolic brings shared file access to virtual machines

Paul Mah — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:12:23 -0400

SAN vendor Sanbolic, better known for its Melio clustered file system that allows Windows servers shared access to files, has extended its technology to VMware virtual machines. Called the Melio Clustered File System Application Data Solution for VMware ESX, the software makes it possible for concurrent application access of the same data by separate servers. While the enterprise-positioned VMware ESX hypervisor stores virtual machines on a shared SAN volume, it works only on a virtual machine level. In the event of a failure, no other server will be able to access the data immediately. Sanbolic's software makes it possible. Gartner's Paquet noted out that Sanbolic's technology could be rendered unnecessary should VMware choose to bundle it by default into its virtualization engine.

For more about Sanbolic:
- check out this Network World article

Vmware Esx

VMware apologizes for ESX bug

Sanbolic brings shared file access to virtual machines