[CentOS-virt] open-vm-tools for latest CentOS-4 and CentOS-5 kernel-vms

Tue Jan 1 16:29:37 UTC 2008
Ray Van Dolson <rvandolson at esri.com>

On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 09:53:34AM -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> I would like to point out that VMware is working very hard to get these
> tools incorporated into Linux distros right now.  Whether or not we
> should do this or promote Xen instead is a different argument for a
> different time.
> 
> Many people use VMWare right now, and these tools will work in all the
> version, not just the free server (though that is where we develop and
> test them).

It's always nice to have options.  We've looked at Xen (and are looking
at XenSource which I guess is the commercial offering), but a large
chunk of our virtualization is Windows running on CentOS-based VMware
hosts and so far Xen doesn't perform as well.  We do keep trying it
though.

> It is possible that we will work with the VMWare people to add other
> tweaks to these kernels for performance gains ... if there are specific
> things called out by them to increase / enhance usability or performance
> inside VMware VMs.

Glad I found this list... as I mentioned we typically are doing CentOS
hosts and virtualizing either Windows or RHEL on those hosts, so I
guess in this case the -vm kernels won't help a lot, but definitely am
going to take a look at the tools.

Ray