Jul 12
It seems presidential candidates are getting into just about everything these days. First Sen. Barak Obama sponsors a race car in the NASCAR Sprint Cup and now he’s forcing your Microsoft Hyper-V host to reboot. Yes, you read that right. A new patch from Microsoft adds words to the dictionary such as “Obama”. This new patch (KB955020) is included in the most recent patch Tuesday and requires a reboot of your system. It impacts Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. This means it also impacts Hyper-V hosts. This is just another reason why it’s a very bad idea to have your virtualization solution tied to a general purpose operating system like Windows or Linux.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:32 am
That patch is not required… just don’t install it. are you suggesting ESX doesn’t require patches and reboots?
http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/s3portal.portal?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=SearchPatch&SearchPatch_actionOverride=%2Fportlets%2Fpatchupdate%2FfindPatch&_pageLabel=s3portal_pages_downloadPatch_page#wlp_SearchPatch
July 13th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Sean,
I’m definitely not saying that ESX doesn’t also require patches. I couldn’t tell you one piece of software out there that doesn’t require patches. Even hardware gets upgraded. I’m also not saying that you necessarily need to install this patch. However, what I am saying is you will get an alert through your patching software that a new patch is ready to be applied to your Windows 2008 hosts which means all of your Hyper-V hosts and then it’s up to you, the administrator, to sift through all of those various patches, figure out if they apply to Hyper-V, and then apply or don’t apply them. With a VMware environment you’d still get alerted of patches but they’ll only be patches that affect the virtualization environment.
I should also mention that when you call up Microsoft for support one of the first questions they’ll ask is if all of the patches have been applied and this is also one of the first things they look at in the system report. Even VMware does that. It’s sort of troubleshooting 101.
I just found a good bit of humor in a patch that adds spell checking for Obama and other words that would affect your Hyper-V hosts. I’m sure you can find a little humor in that as well. The whole point of the post was to say there are pains to having a general purpose OS running your virtualization solution and that’s why VMware was designed to run without it.
Thanks for the post and the reading. Please keep the comments coming in the future.
P.S. For a more detailed look at patching comparisons you can see this post: http://mikedatl.typepad.com/mikedvirtualization/2007/12/vmware-patch-tu.html.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Looks like someone else agrees from the real world: http://geekyschmidt.com/2008/07/12/just-say-no-to-os-level-virtualization/.
July 14th, 2008 at 3:25 am
I bet it is best to install the patch. Reason is very simple, try to perform a spelling check and tell me what M$ Word suggest to replace the word Obama. It come out to be another popular name… gosh!!
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
in response to PK’s: “I bet it is best to install the patch. Reason is very simple, try to perform a spelling check and tell me what M$ Word suggest to replace the word Obama. It come out to be another popular name… gosh!!”
1) Why would anyone ever need to spell check anything on their virtualization host? Not only that, why would you ever type the work “obama” on your server to begin with?
2) Maybe M$ Word has some keen insight into Obama………
July 24th, 2008 at 6:12 am
You have to reboot in order to install a spell check update?
WTF?
Come back Jim – all is forgiven (even vista).
July 30th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hi
Forgot one thing ; while both hypervisors sometimes need to reboot after installing patches/upgrades ; if you have more than 1 host you can use maint mode to move your guests around ; thus no impact. With Hyper-V, MS told us its OK to have a small outage ; after all thats what happens in the physical world
March 25th, 2009 at 11:33 am
[...] releases their hypervisor, as an application on Windows 2008. Barack Obama causes reboots on MS hypervisors. They don’t get it. (We’ll write off MS to our Tommorowland analogy, even [...]