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-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.
I managed to get a bare install by using the alternate ISO, then using F4 from the boot menu (install command line system). Finally found how to correctly install open-vm-tools on Lucid:
- Install Lucid
apt-get dist-upgrade- reboot
apt-get install --no-install-recommends linux-headers-virtual open-vm-dkms open-vm-tools
The trick here is to use --no-install-recommends. The GUI tools are in the Recommends of the CLI tools (don't ask me), so installing the CLI tools with just apt-get install open-vm-tools will also pull down the X stuff.
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 installation of the OS, tools, headers etc as per above, your VM should now have loaded the appropriate modules:
However, at this stage Vcenter will not say the tools are OK anymore, but instead are Unmanaged.
This might sounds like a bummer, but it appears to be a cosmetic issue and in fact the tools are OK.
Here is what my VM looks like in Vcenter. You can see that the VM is using Thin Provisioning, so that despite the VM having an 18 GB disk, it uses less than 3 GB because it is still pristine.
