[CentOS-virt] CentOS 5.1 guide for VMware Fusion

[Sean Dilda]

Bradley Sepos wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2008 12:14 AM, Daniel de Kok <me at danieldk.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 2/18/08, Bradley Sepos <bradleysepos at 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.