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ESX 3.5 Update 2 brought with it a raft of new features and innovations. A lot of which were well overdue, including full 10 gig support for storage traffic! But it appears to also have been released without having the time restriction removed when it lifecycled to release. The problem has been popping up all over the world and affecting all of the early adopters.
Read on for details of the problem, workaround, timeframes for resolution, and a statement from VMware on the problem.
What happens when the product expires :
Virtual Machines are prevented from powering on, and migration of VMs fails on an ESX virtual Infrastructure once system clocks have reached the 12th of August. It is unclear at this point what impact the bug has on High Availability functionality.
What are the signs that I am affected :
When performing general infrastructure operations, you may get the error message below.
A general system error occurred: Internal Error
If you have not already upgraded to Update 2 it is strongly recommended that you remain on your current version of ESX in the short term. If you have a pressing requirement to upgrade for bug fixes in older versions, the build of choice is ESX 3.5 Update 1 with all patches applied.
If you have already upgraded to Update 2, an unofficial workaround is to set the host date one week in the past. Extreme caution should be applied in doing this , as the date changes can be passed through to Virtual Machines. If you proceed with this approach please ensure VMs are set to not synchronise time with the Host clock.
The preferred approach - if possible - is to maintain the infrastructure as is (i.e. do not change host dates). This will prevent you from deploying new VMs, and performing normal daily operations, but it will avoid the risk of a date change on your VMs which could affect AD and other critical services.
If you have experienced the issue please log a call with VMware support.
It is anticipated that VMware will have a fix for the problem very shortly. There is a VMware Knowldge Base Article for the issue at the link below:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1006716&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=21564896&stateId=1%200%2021568096
There is also a thread on the VMware community forums which you can view here:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/162377?tstart=0
A VMware employee has posted the following information (text in blue) on the VMware Community, so it looks like the patch to resolve the problem is not going to come as soon as we would like.
Dear Customers,
An issue has been uncovered with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 that causes the product license to expire on August 12.
VMware engineering has isolated the root cause of this issue and will reissue the various upgrade media including the ESX 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESXi 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESX 3.5 Update 2 upgrade tar and zip files in the next 36 hours (by noon, August 13, PST).
They will be available from the page: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi. Until then, we advise against upgrading to ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
The Update patch bundles will be released separately later in the week.
The issue is being tracked on KB 1006716 on http://kb.vmware.com/
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that has been caused.
The VMware ESX Product Team
Additional Concerns :
The obvious thought when this happens is that early adopters are always the ones to get bitten. BUT in the past the VMware Infrastructure product set has always been reputed for its stability and the minimal amount of issues after release which are addressed post haste.
After the issue was identified and confirmed internally within VMware, a number of key enterprise customers were informed by their account managers which was impressive. What was less than impressive was the lack of similar communication from VMware to their Partner community.
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