Here’s my take on it. Mistakes happen… it’s how you deal with it that shows your true colors. Not only did VMware quickly acknowledge the problem, they were prompt in notifying customers, giving advice on how to minimize the impact and providing a solution.

Sure, that’s great… they did everything you’d expect them to do, right?

Yes, and then some.

Did you expect them to proactively send you multiple emails with progress updates? Did you expect your local sales rep to send out additional information in the middle of the night? Did you expect the CEO to PUBLICLY address the problems and detail their mistakes? No. And that’s why I still have confidence in their product and ability.

In hindsight, it was a little over-reactive, and in fairness VMware did a good job of dealing with the incident and providing good information throughout.

I think it’s worth mentioning that regardless of when we installed Update 2, it would have been incredibly hard to detect this bug in a Lab environment. For what it’s worth, we left it well over a week before installing Update 2.

For all we know, countless software packages could have yet to be discovered licensing bugs that will hit us in the future. Much of the software patching process is based on a reactive rather than pro-active approach: once an issue is discovered, action is taken to fix the problem. In this regard, VMware did an excellent job at releasing a solution as soon as they were able. I understand this problem affected a significant number of customers, and I’m not trying to diminish that. But, given the nature of the bug and the immediate necessity of a solution, VMware worked effectively under great pressure.

Although this does slightly reduce my confidence in VMware’s products, I am pleased with their rapid response, and believe the situation would have been better handled if the bug had been discovered a few days earlier. I believe that this will be a huge lesson for them, but will only lead to better products and better testing of those products, which will benefit all of us in the end.

Steve, you also have a valid point. However, from an end user’s perspective, there should be no reason (or any way really) to test for this kind of situation. Sure, you could test for compatibily with your internal systems before going live with it, but should we really need to worry about whether or not our licenses are going to work correctly?

Regardless, this is why we have test/dev environments. If you’re the type to upgrade prod systems the day the patches are released you have no one to blame but yourself.