VMware Australia plays down bug
VMware's Australia and New Zealand division today said the local impact was small from a botched software patch that had left some customers unable to start their virtualised environments.
The bug, introduced in a recent patch, had left customers around the world stranded from 12 August due to issues with VMware's licensing management code. Globally VMware had advised customers not to stop virtual environments until the firm had released a patch to fix it.
Paul Harapin
(Credit: VMware)
VMware Australia and New Zealand vice president Paul Harapin said he first became aware of the issue yesterday at lunchtime, when local support engineers started fielding calls.
"Within half an hour we had every engineer and technical account manager in our Australia and New Zealand operations with a workaround," he said, noting an express fix was available soon after, and a full update "any moment now".
Australia and New Zealand were hit by the issue first due to the differences in time zone.
The issue had the potential to have a wide impact in IT departments right around the nation, with most large organisations using VMware in one way or another. However, Harapin said most customers weren't affected as their VMware installations weren't completely up to date.
"We haven't seen much impact from an Australian perspective," he said.
Damian Murdoch, the virtualisation practice manager at local technical consultancy Technical Architecture Solutions, said he had fielded a number of calls about the problem, mainly from small to medium business clients who were early adopters and had upgraded their VMware systems with the botched patch.
"Large enterprises have better change management procedures," he said. Murdoch said it was "very rare" that VMware would have an issue of this nature.
Murdoch said he felt VMware acted fairly quickly in communicating the issue to the community.
The consultant also runs the ozvms.com website, where he has posted an email from VMware to customers, in which the virtualisation giant has promised to deliver updates on the issue every two hours.
VMware's Harapin said he didn't know if the company had received a higher volume of support calls. "Nothing that seemed out of the ordinary," he said. He said he did not believe the issue would affect VMware's reputation permanently.