VMware® Workstation 6.5 provides the deepest OS support, best-in-class virtual machine architecture, the richest desktop user experience and an unmatched set of features to enhance productivity.

InfoWorld says that VMware Workstation 6.5 is “the gold standard for desktop virtualization…truly a world-class product and a pace-setter for the entire industry.”

VMware Workstation 6.5 is packed with new features, including:

• “Unity” view provides a seamless desktop experience.
• DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 2 graphics enable Windows 3D applications and games.
• Easy Install simplifies the creation of Windows and Linux virtual machines.
• Powerful Record and Replay for groundbreaking debugging capabilities.

Workstation 6.5, the leader in desktop virtualization.

Get details about all of the new features.

- The VMware Workstation Team

Hello,

As many of you already know, on August 12, 2008, we experienced a code issue with the updated versions of ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2). The issue triggered a premature expiration of the product license, causing a range of possible problems including the inability to power-on virtual machines on affected hosts.

At that time, I wrote that we would do everything in our power to ensure this type of incident is never repeated. Since then, we have initiated a major examination and evaluation of our product release and quality assurance processes. This effort has yielded a number of areas for improvement, and we have already begun making needed changes.

• We have removed any instances of the type of “time-out” code from all major, minor and maintenance code releases for VMware enterprise products and will not incorporate this type of code in our licensed products going forward.
• We are instituting a range of enhancements to our quality assurance process to place even greater emphasis on standardized, automated quality testing.
• We are driving greater transparency, accountability, and oversight on the entire product release lifecycle with new formal documentation and auditing procedures.

While these are necessary and important steps, they are by no means the sum total of our efforts in this area. VMware’s products and internal processes have been designed to support mission critical environments, and we take the responsibility that comes with our role as a core element in IT infrastructures very seriously. To that end, we are taking further actions to improve the overall VMware customer experience going forward.

• First, we will continue to ensure that VMware products are designed to support the reliability, availability and serviceability needs of enterprise production environments. We are investing significant resources towards improving how our products are installed and upgraded (such as with VMware Update Manager); developing more technology enablers that work to eliminate downtime (e.g. Storage VMotion) and redesigning how licensing and activation work. To get a sense of where we are pushing the boundaries here, I invite you to register to be part of our beta programs for VMware Infrastructure and other products.
• Second, we will improve and better align our efforts around supporting and communicating to customers in response to product issues. We have established a company-wide effort intended to streamline and standardize how we reach out to any of our customers affected by a product issue.
• Third, we will continue to provide our customers with the guidance and proven best practices to deploy, scale, and manage VMware across their datacenters. By enabling our customers to better “operationalize” their VMware environments, we will be helping them to anticipate, plan for, and easily respond to any issues that come their way. This kind of assistance is already available through our Professional Services and VMware Authorized Consultant offerings. We are making this kind of information more accessible to all VMware customers with our recently launched VI OPS portal, along with a new “VMware on VMware” program designed to provide insight into how we use our products in our own production IT environment.

We at VMware have always set high standards for ourselves in terms of product quality and customer experience. Going forward, we’ll continue to raise the bar here.

Thank you for your continued support.

Paul Maritz
President and CEO
VMware

Dear VMware Customer,

We have re-issued the entire ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 release (ISOs, upgrade tar and zip files, and patch bundles). They are available for download at http://www.vmware.com/download/.

Please note this update is only relevant to customers who did not install the impacted release of ESX 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103909). If you have installed either of these please visit http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/esxexpresspatches.html and install the express patch.

Thank you,

The VMware ESX Product Team

Dear VMware Customer,

This message is to inform you that we are experiencing a delay in releasing the new version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Our testing of this release is taking longer than anticipated. We are now targeting to release the update between 2:00 AM PDT (0700 UTC) August 14 and 8:00 AM (1500 UTC) August 14 PDT.

We apologize for the delay. VMware engineering teams are working around the clock to deliver this new version. We will continue to keep you informed of developments until this issue is fully resolved.

Please note this update is only relevant to customers who did not install the impacted release of ESX 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103909). If you have installed either of these please visit http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/esxexpresspatches.html and install the express patch.

Thank you,

The VMware ESX Product Team

Dear VMware Customers,

We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see the KB articles for deployment information regarding Update Manager.

The KB articles are kept up-to-date. Please refer to the KB articles for information and updates.

In our last update, we referred to an initiative by our support and engineering teams to find an option to apply the patch without the necessity of entering maintenance mode and VMotion of VM’s to other servers, or VM power-off and re-power-on. Our earlier tests have not found a consistently successful way to address this. We continue to investigate this possibility, as we know that it would reduce the maintenance burden on our customers who may not have a patched server available for VMotion.

We are on target to release updated versions of the ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 patch at 6 PM PST today. This is for customers who have not already upgraded to the previously released version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Thank you,

The VMware ESX Product Team

Problem:

An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX Update 2 (build number 103909) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) 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.

The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.
————–
Module License Power on failed.

Affected Products:

- VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Thank you, The VMware ESX Product Team

- The problem will be seen if ESX350-200806201-UG is applied to a system.

- No other VMware products are affected.

Resolution:

VMware Engineering has produced express patches for impacted customers to resolve the issue.

Get it here:  https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1

From VMware:

Features & Benefits

Virtualize processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines with VMware ESXi, an enterprise-class hypervisor with a thin 32 MB footprint for added security and reliability.

VMware ESXi is the virtualization platform customers build upon for continuous application availability and infrastructure security. With VMware Infrastructure 3, customers can add the benefits of server consolidation, automatic load balancing and business continuity to ESXi.

Now think of the common bottlenecks in this situation: w3wp.exe (IIS App Pool worker processes) stopping, Exchange store corruption, SQL server latency, Disk I/O latency, etc.

For a web host, using virtualization to segregate these different tiers can be essential to a secure and fault tolerant infrastructure.

First, let’s examine the benefits of segregating the WFE’s (IIS) from the rest of the group.  Having a WFE on a virtual server allows you to quickly recover from most disasters/compromises, quickly scale or downsize your farm, and above all, you can now efficiently reduce the total physical resources required to serve sites/services.

By having a master image, preloaded with required 3rd part applications, components, services, and disk configurations, you can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to produce new front end webservers.  Some may say that a disk image will give you the same benefit, but with virtualization, you’re also able to dynamically adjust network settings and RAM amounts. In addition, adding disks/SAN resources to the server is extremely simplified compared to having to manually configure and match a RAID configuration to a disk image.

Having multiple virtual front ends also enables you to more efficiently use your centralized storage. Instead of leaving wasted space on a physical server’s hard drives/array, you are now able to reduce the HDD footprint of the VM’s OS partition, and eliminate the need for replication or wasted space on unused physical disks.

Security is also enhanced when you separate the WFE from the SQL store.  Having the SQL farm outside your DMZ not only contributes to a more secure environment, it also reduces the amount of disaster recovery time required in the event if a server rebuild.

1. Virtualization is here to stay, end of discussion
2. Web server virtualization is just as efficient as physical hosting
3. Microsoft’s Virtual PC Virtualization is WORTHLESS. End of discussion (The Server 2008 edition rocks, more on that in another post!)
4. VMware is the industry leader, but there are a lot of other platforms on which to run your VM web hosts

Now that we have the debate topics out of the way, let’s delve into what virtualization is and what virtualization isn’t.

What Is Virtualization?

Virtualization is running multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform. 4 instances of Windows 2003 Server and 2 instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux all running on one physical server. Sound impossible? It’s not.  It’s the latest trend in datacenter consolidation.  Why buy 6 physical 4U machines when you can buy a single 4-8U machine and run each operating system independent of one another?

What Virtualization Isn’t.

Virtualization isn’t sticking an unlimited number of guest operating systems on a single machine.  You still have the constraints of finite memory, storage, and processing ability.  The more guest operating systems you bring online, the fewer resources there are to distribute.

Virtualization is also not a replacement for dedicated servers.  More on that in another post.