ESX 3.5
I am testing Ubuntu Lucid Beta1 this week on our ESX 3.5 servers (managed by Vcenter 4.0).
The VMware tools have been an issue forever, for various reasons:
- Ubuntu kernel upgrades render the binary VMware shipped modules unusable
- Official VMware tools lag behind
The open source Open open-vm-tools are good, and with the recent addition of the dkms system it is possible to recompile the modules on a abi-bumping kernel upgrade.
...
- Install Lucid
apt-get dist-upgrade- reboot
apt-get install --no-install-recommends linux-headers-`uname -r` virtual open-vm-dkms open-vm-tools
...
Everything seems to work just fine:
ESX 4.0
I have recently upgraded reinstalled our ESX servers so they now run ESX4.0u1. This introduces new virtual hardware (v7 instead of v4), which the open-vm-tools can use. If you want to take advantage of the new features, remove the default NIC, then add a new one of type VMXNET3. Change the SCSI controller so the type is VMware Paravirtual.
After this upgrade, Vcenter will not say the tools are OK anymore, but that they are Unmanaged.
This might sounds like a bummer, but in this appears to be a cosmetic issue and in fact the tools are OK.
Here is what my VM looks like in Vcenter:
