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After I upgraded my hosts to ESXi 4.1, and our VCenter to 4.1, my 64 bit Ubuntu Lucid VMs will die each night when VCB tries to snapshot them for backup 
This is a real show stopper, and the Ubuntu provided open-vm-tools are more or less rendered useless by this issue. I already filed a bugreport.
I tried using the VMware provided Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs), which should be supported according to their web site.
Upon closer inspection it turns out that this is the same old crap like it was with 8.04 LTS: only the default and hence outdated/insecure kernel is supported. Even worse, manually recompiling the kernel modules like 8.04 does not even work anymore because of broken packages.
Which leaves me no other way that to go with the option that is the most work: the tar.gz installer. This does give the 'benefit' of being supported, i.e. the status is actually "OK" in VCenter.
| Operating | VCenter | Distro provided | asdf | x | x |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Works with stock kernel | | | | |||
Works with updated kernel | | | | |||
Administration burden | | | |
I guess if I want to be up-to-date and safe, VMware leaves me no other way than to just use the tar.gz installer.
To be continued. In the meantime I will investigate other ways to fix this, maybe backporting the Maverick open-vm-tools or something.