Software Error Locks VMware Customers out of Virtual Machines

By Greg McNevin

August 14, 2008: VMware customers are struggling to log into their virtual machines this week, after a bug in a software update began blocking them due to “expired licences”.

The problems began on Tuesday when the company rolled out update 2 for ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5, and the software began identifying valid ESX licenses as expired during system start up.

VMware says an issue with the software’s timeout mechanism is to blame and has reassured its customers that the error is not related to exploitation of a security issue on ESX.

“Several customers have been worried that their ESX systems had been compromised by an attack and that this was the cause for not booting of their ESX update 2 Virtual Machines today,” reads the official VMware blog.

“We know that the boot problem is due to an expired license. License expiration was set at August 12 and was not removed prior to releasing ESX(i) Update 2. VMotion is affected by the license expiration as well.”

The company has made an express patch available for those affected, and says it will provide a permanent fix shortly.

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