VMware boss apologises for crippled servers

 

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Posted on 14 Aug 2008 at 09:39

VMware's chief executive has apologised for a recent update which left many enterprises with crippled servers.

"I want to apologise for the disruption and difficulty this issue may have caused to our customers and our partners," says VMware CEO Paul Maritz, writing in an open letter on the company's website.

The problem first surfaced on Wednesday, when users found they where unable to power up their virtual servers after updating to the latest software. Instead they were greeted with an error message claiming their virtualisation license had expired on 12 August.

It is common for software companies to leave these "time bombs" in place on beta code, in order to force users to upgrade to the full version upon release, however, it's not so common to leave the code in place when the full product is released, something Maritz acknowledged.

" ... am sure you're wondering how this could happen. We failed in two areas. Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2 and not catching it in our quality assurance process.

"We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn't happen again. VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers."

Outrage

However, whether the apology is enough to pacify users outraged at the bug only time will tell, with one typical poster on the VMware forums reporting.

"Let me speak for everyone when I say this type of bug simply isn't acceptable. Ever.

"VMware wants the world to run all or nearly all it's applications in hypervisors. Any bug which manages to get past QA testing and which could arbitrarily prevent running on VM's across the entire world without any advanced warning is pretty much close to the definition of worst case scenario.

"I've lost a lot of faith in VMware QA here...
Very disappointed."

Author: Stuart Turton