VMware Bug: Waiting for a patch...

Ok, I couldn't resist... I had to get my opinion out on the 'by-now-famous' bug in the ESX 3.5u2 hypervisor.

This morning, I was worried. I imagined having to shut down several updated ESX servers hosting more than 100 VMs, patching the servers and bringing the VMs up again.

Looking around and discussing with Tim Jacobs, I looked back at one the posts he refers to. It struck me that the error is logged in '/var/log/vmware/hostd.log'. This means that it is the host management process that is logging the error. To me, it would make sense if the VMkernel doesn't care about licensing and just does its job.

As a consequence, it must be possible for VMware to create a patch that does not require a host reboot.

This afternoon, I look forward to such a patch.