There’s a major bug which has affected NZ and Australian VMware users today, and is expected to hit users in the rest of the world when their clocks roll over to 12th of August 2008.
It prevents any guest operating systems from starting or using VMotion on ESX and occurs in VMware’s latest version ESX 3.5 update 2 (build 103908) which was released on the 27th of July 2008.
The bug seems to be within the licencing system and only occurs after 11 of August 2008.
When trying to start a guest operating system the alarming message “A general system error occurred: Internal Error” is displayed.
Messages below are displayed in /var/log/vmware/hostd.log, and the log file for any virtual machine which is attempted to be VMotion’ed or Powered on :
Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx http://msg.license.product.expired/ This product has expired.
Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
For now the only workaround from VMware is to adjust the clock on the ESX/ESXi server back to before the 12 of August 2008.
Here are some instructions on how to do this.
Turn off NTP (if you’re using it), and then manually set the date of the hosts back to 10th of August. This can be done either through the VI Client (Host -> Configuration -> Time Configuration) or by typing date -s “10/08/2008” at the Service Console command line on the ESX hosts.
Update 14/8/2008
Turned out to be a major bug, took VMware a couple of days to release a patch. It’s available here with more details.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006721.html
Peter C's Tech. 