VMware VI 3.5 Update 1 wrong bits cause panic
April 10 VMware released the first minor update for its flagship product: VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1.
As expected many customers took advantage of the weekend to download the new build and install it.
Unfortunately the early adopters are not reporting a smooth upgrading experience.
The biggest problem is that the bits available are not the ones of Update 1, according to the build numbers: while the website declares a final build number of 84782, the downloaded bits install a version with the build 84767 (a discrepancy confirmed by the MD5 signature mismatch).
The wrong build provided any sort of technical issues to the unlucky early adopters which tried to perform an upgrade: disabled plug-ins, VirtualCenter Client crashes, guest OS templates disappearance and inability to customize then, etc.
Besides a lot of time wasted, the build mismatch also impacted the productivity in some cases: some customers in fact installed the VI 3.5 Update 1 in labs while others put it directly into production environments.
VMware was informed of the problem immediately and invited to download the bits again the day after. Unfortunately the re-downloaded ISOs were still providing the build 84767, causing chaos among users.
The second answer VMware provided clarified that, despite the MD5 mismatch, the available bits were the correct ones. Despite that customers continued to experience crashes and were forced to downgrade to 3.5.0 (which caused a painful mess of different builds for different tiers of the virtual infrastructure).
After the entire weekend VMware has yet to solve the problem while the number of users afftected by the issue grew exponentially: so far the VMTN thread about the topic got 989 visits with 79 replies.
This is already the second time that VMware publishes the wrong build for a production release: before April it already happened in December 2007, when the company released VI 3.5.0. The correct build wasn’t posted online untile February 2008.
Now customers, already complaining for the plethora of different build numbers on any GA release, are afraid that VMware will correct this second error after another two months.
Update: VMware sent us a note to specify that the build numbers mentioned above are not incorrect.
The VI 3.5 Update 1 comes with different build numbers for each component and while the Virtual Infrastructure Management Installer has the GA build 84782, the VirtualCenter itself has the GA build of 84767.
At today VMware is still investigating the issue and thinks it may depend on its content distribution service: Akamai.
Second update: At the end of Tuesday, 5 days after the first incident, VMware finally solved the problem, confirming its error in uploading the wrong bits on the Akamai content delivery system. And with the promise to not offer a third similar experience.
virtualization.info Newest articles
December 20th, 2011
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x…
December 20th, 2011
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and…
December 7th, 2011
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several…
December 7th, 2011
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and…
December 6th, 2011
In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which…
December 6th, 2011
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May…
December 6th, 2011
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The…
November 29th, 2011
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual…
November 21st, 2011
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this…
November 21st, 2011
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform…
November 17th, 2011
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS)…
November 17th, 2011
VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.
VKernel entered the virtualization market in…
November 16th, 2011
Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.
Suite 2012…
November 15th, 2011
In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress