VMWare's Australia and New Zealand division today said the local impact was small from a botched software patch that had left some customers unable to start their virtualised environments.

According to an article on ZDNet Australia, the folks down under may not have been affected with the latest VMware software bug, at least not wide spread.  Because of the time zone differences, Australia and New Zealand were hit with the August 12th Update bug before anyone else.  However, VMware Australia and New Zealand vice president Paul Harapin said he first became aware of the problem at lunchtime when local support staff started getting the calls.  But oddly enough, Harapin said "most customers weren't affected as their VMware installations weren't completely up to date." 

VMware doesn't put numbers out there for people to see just where people are in the upgrade process.  So trying to find out how many people are actually using ESX 3.5 is difficult enough, but knowing how many people have Update 2 installed is just as difficult.

"Within half an hour we had every engineer and technical account manager in our Australia and New Zealand operations with a workaround," he said, noting an express fix was available soon after, and a full update "any moment now".

Harapin also told ZDNet he didn't know if the company had received a higher volume of support calls. "Nothing that seemed out of the ordinary," he said. He said he did not believe the issue would affect VMWare's reputation permanently.