Since there were some serious vulnerabilities discovered in VMware products lately, it is time to upgrade to the latest releases of their software if you are running it.

I run a VMware server @home on my Core 2 Duo machine to test some OS/configurations without the need of physical machines. In the beginning of this year I needed to replace the hard drive of this machine and since it is a Core 2 Duo I chose to install a 64 bit Debian on the machine as main OS.

Ever since then, I was having strange problems with the VMware server on that machine. It was able to run a windows guest (except if the guest was under high load) but unable to run a linux guest. When I booted a linux guest OS on the server it simply crashed the host. And I do mean crashed, the system was totally unresponsive and nothing was to be seen on the screen or in the logs pointing to a cause of the error. I blamed it on the ‘experimental’ 64 bit support in VMware server although it seemed to run fine on some Xeon systems @work. Anyhow, a virtual machine crashing the host machine is not good! It means that there are some very serious issues in the software which could possibly be exploited for bad.

With the new release out today, I checked the release notes hoping for a clue that my issue was finally resolved. A lot of issues were fixed but my specific issue was not mentioned. A little disappointed, I started the upgrade process from my 1.0.3 to 1.0.4 anyway and it appears to be that I am lucky today because I am now able to run windows, linux and other guests without problems! So the issue must have been resolved by one of the fixes they implemented in 1.0.4!