Bradley Sepos wrote:

On Feb 18, 2008 12:14 AM, Daniel de Kok me@danieldk.org wrote:

...

Hi,

On 2/18/08, Bradley Sepos bradleysepos@gmail.com wrote:

...

I recently created a VM running CentOS 5.1 x86-64 for development purposes. Along the way, I found a number of fixes to various issues one can experience under VMware and decided to turn my documentation into a general guide that others might benefit from. I have not found any guides for VMware Fusion on OS X, so I figured it is a worthwhile endeavor. It is likely that most or all of this guide applies to VMware Workstation as well.

Looks great! How about describing how to install Johnny Hughes' open-vm-tools packages, rather than manually installing the vmware tools?:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-virt/2007-December/000158.html

With kind regards, Daniel

Thanks Daniel, I will have to look into this when I set up another machine. The author describes them as "very much" experimental... are you currently running these tools? If so, what benefits are you seeing above the proprietary package?

Who has described open-vm-tools as '"very much" exerimental'? I'm using them in production without problems. Its actually a fork of the code-base for the VMware Tools you're installing.

As for what the benefits are, I'd say the ability to have them sanely packaged (like Johnny Hughes did). One of the big problems with the package from VMware is you have to run a script after install that compiles kernel modules, and you have to keep running that script every time you install a new kernel. That doesn't scale well when you have a large number of VMs. And its extremely difficult to to do completely automated installs with it.

With open-vm-tools, you can install an rpm package that's already built for your kernel.

In my environment, the packagine issues with the VMware-provided rpm made it impossible to deploy. However, thanks to open-vm-tools coming out, I actually have a sane deployment strategy that allows me to use vmware tools.