I hope that there's some serious thought given to how licensing / activation is handled inside of the VI3 product line. I'll admit I've never been comfortable with it - it's the only piece of mission-critical software we currently have that actually needs FlexLM and active license checks in order to function. We're not using Windows Server 2008 at this point.
Frankly, now that 3i is free, what logic is there to disabling VM startup on any version? I'm not even talking about the additional features here. Just starting up VMs.
I've been a huge supporter of VMware over the past few years. We started with ESX 2.0, and it's saved our behinds, given the resource, space and staffing constraints in our environment. But this is a big screwup. Even sites with change management processes could get hit with this - what if a bug like this hadn't surfaced for a couple of extra weeks? How many more sites would have OK'd it in the meantime? How many arbitrary dates in the future should be tested to make sure the licensing feature doesn't drop dead?
Making the basic, critical functionality (booting and running VMs) of a product dependent on license checks looks like the solution to a sales/marketing problem is being put ahead of the needs of actual customers. And guess what? This incident is going to be a sales problem going forward, if VMware doesn't address this in a really forthright manner - beyond just the bugfix. They need to say how it happened, and why this particular problem won't happen again. Sure, that can be uncomfortable, but it clears the air.
