VMX Bandits

VMware have just announce that VMware Workstation 6.5 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available.

You can download this Release Candidate by visiting the Workstation 6.5 Beta Program page and be one of the first to try out this Release Candidate. Improvements since Beta 2 include performance enhancements for Record/Replay and numerous bug fixes.

VMware have updated their VMware Server 2.0 product to RC2 and with this release comes a number of changes.

Such as:-

• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS):  Properly backup the state of the Windows virtual machines when using the snapshot feature to maintain data integrity of the applications running inside the virtual machine.


• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Support for fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host.


• Support for SCSI pass-through (generic) devices: Allows for SCSI devices such as tape backup devices to be connected to virtual machines.


• Expand disk capacity on the fly: Allows for adding new SCSI hard disks and controllers to a running virtual machine.


• Firefox 3 as a supported browser for the management interface.


• Remote Client Devices: Access devices such as CD-ROMs that are not physically connected to the host via VMware Remote Console

Seems after Australia went to bed and the rest of the world started waking up to the Aug 12 nightmare that is vmware's licensing bug the vmware communities thread about the issue went from 4 pages to over 40.

Anyway, news is VMware has a KB article about the problem which includes patches and other info:

kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html

I was most amused to read that the patch required a reboot. They must have realised this was going to be a problem, so they helpfully added some advice "...VMotion off running VMs, apply the patches and VMotion the VMs back." So that's all I need to do to get VMotion working again, is it?

Yay, some new information popping up at the VMware Communities site that seems to indicate people following the instructions for the workaround (ie, setting the date back to Aug 10) are finding their guest OS's dates set backwards as well, in spite of the fact that (a) they've turned off all the time sync options, and (b) the product documentation apparently states and/or communication with vmware indicated that ESX won't try and sync times ~backwards~, only forwards.

As an aside, it occurred to me when I was reading everyone move past the constructive debugging into the whinging phase of the thread asking when this might be fixed that we've already been given a clue as to a likely timeline: note we were asked to set our clocks back TWO days....