I am testing Ubuntu Lucid Beta1 this week on our ESX 3.5 servers.
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-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.
As of today (April 1, no joke) there seems to be an annoying dependency problem in the Ubuntu provided open-vm-tools packages. This means that apt-get will always install the entire X11 system.
This is not what most server admins want - they want the minimal set of CLI tools.
I was able to work around this by recompiling open-vm-tools without all those dependencies. The resulting open-vm-toolbox package is then broke, but I don't need that anyway. The open-vm-tools package seems to work just fine.
At least my VSphere is happy with it and recognize it. (pics here)