No more hiding VMware

During my recent tech support case with Microsoft, I went to great lengths to hide the fact that my Exchange 2007 server is running on VMware (and I’m proud to say they never figured it out) ;-)  Why did I do this? Because currently Microsoft will not give you support if you’re running in VMware. If you have deep pockets they will give you some support, but that certainly doesn’t include us. They want shops like ours to duplicate any issues we have on hardware, to prove that it’s not a problem with their app running in ESX. THEN they may give support.

So I was very happy to see the announcement from VMware that they are part of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. According to VMware, by virtue of being in this program ESX will be certified “in the near future.” That is great news for VMware shops, and I’m very happy that soon I won’t have to hide my VMware use from MS tech support!

Another Failed Test

If you’re into pro audio at all, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the “white space” war that is currently going on between giants like Google (who want forthcoming high-powered consumer devices to be able to operate in these white spaces) and wireless microphone manufacturers (who want their gear to continue to use these spaces like they always have, and do so reliably).

According to FOH Online the latest round of tests with these consumer devices in a real-world situation (NFL game) failed. The Google camp believes they can create devices “smart” enough to detect wireless mics in use and avoid them, or use “becons” to determine that wireless mics are in use, but to date all such proof-of-concept tests have failed. This latest test is significant because it was done under actual real-world conditions, not some contrived lab experiment.

I’m not sure it’s even technically feasible for low end consumer devices to ever be that smart, but I’m also sure the “Googles” of this battle aren’t going to simply give up. Too much money is at stake, and deep pockets talk. The only sure thing in this fight over the next year is that it will be intense. I just hope in the end our investment in high end wireless mics isn’t for nothing. If the giants get their way, it will be Very Ugly for current wireless technology.

While all of the big wireless mic manufacturers are on the case with this issue, Shure has been on the forefront of the fight. See here for tons of in-depth info into this issue.

Major VMWare 3.5 bug

During our weekly maintenance window tonight I had to reboot both of my ESX 3.5 hosts, after which I could not start any VMs! Instead of the VMs starting as they should, I was greeted with a typically-useful VMWare error message (can you hear the sarcasm?) saying “A general system error occurred: Internal Error” Gee, that’s helpful. Thanks VMWare!

I googled that error and by some miracle got a hit to this thread in the VMWare forums. It details how the ESX 3.5 Update 2 patch released last week apparently time bombs on August 12! At that time, licensing expires but you don’t realize it until you need to restart or vmotion a machine, after which it refuses to start because it thinks your license has expired!

The “simple” fix is to set the ESX host’s time back to at least August 10, 2008… which will let your VMs start. That’s the good news. The bad news is that even if you’re not syncing the guest time with the host (that little checkbox in VMWare tools is disabled), the guest VM still needs to get an initial time from the host (because there is no CMOS battery to store a hardware clock, of course) and this can wreak havoc within the guest VM. On my Exchange 2007 VM, for example, the information store wouldn’t even start because the time was off and of course it couldn’t authenticate to AD because the time was outside of the Kerberos 5 minute limit.  Thankfully once the guest time was THEN set back to the correct time Exchange came up fine.

As of this writing there is still no patch from VMWare, and the natives are quite upset in the forums. I’m with them. This type of error that can bring down your organization simply because of a licensing error is utterly inexcusable by VMWare. They deserve all of the shame they will get on this one. How this one got by QA is anyone’s guess, but I’m betting it was a RGE (Resume-Generating Event) for someone…

YammyDigital.net, one year later…

I was reminded last week that it’s been almost one year since I registered the YammyDigital.net domain (the registrar was reminding me to renew), which has caused me to stand back take an honest look at what YammyDigital.net has become over the last 12 months. By any measure the site has been… a complete failure!
For those who have never heard of YammyDigital.net (I’m not surprised), here’s what it was supposed to be: A place where fans of Yamaha digital sound consoles could discuss them. See, a few years ago there was a site called PM5D.org which had a very vibrant community discussing the PM5D console, and it became an invaluable resource to me. But the site kept getting hacked and it was running on the owner’s unstable PowerBook or something, and all of the content was lost at least two times. It struggled along and tried to recover, but eventually the site just went away.

After waiting 10 months for it to come back, I decided it was gone for good and started YammyDigital.net, hoping to provide a new place to discuss these consoles. The only problem was that I had no way to let the masses know that it existed, and no one came. Sure, I tried to add the site to various search engines, but that didn’t do much good, if any. A few people signed up at the beginning but quickly faded away as there was never enough “critical mass” generated. The only regulars the site gets today are bots trying to get around the CAPTCHA
Ironically, literally a week or so after I started YammyDigital.net, I got a note from the PM5D.org guy that his forums were back up! (Talk about timing!) You might think the reason YammyDigital.net has never taken off is perhaps because everyone simply went back to the resurrected PM5D.org forums… however, if you take a look there today you will see that they are nearly as sparse and empty as YammyDigital.net is, and hardly any of the old community seems to have come back… and he had the advantage of emailing the news to a list of existing users from his old forums. I think this serves as a perfect example of how fragile online communities can be. They can be thriving and alive for years, but can dissolve instantly when the site goes away for a significant period of time and never recover, even if it returns.

What will be the future of YammyDigital.net? I’m not sure. Clearly they are doing no one any good right now, but renewing a domain is pretty cheap and the server already exists, so… I will probably give it another year before crying uncle and throwing in the towel. In the mean time I’m still looking for “that place” to discuss Yamaha digital consoles, since mine clearly isn’t it…