See my previous post about this:

http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=300296#300296

The short version is, yes it's legal. VMware does not impose any limitations on how you can use the VMware Tools. Note that it's up to you to make sure that you have proper licensing for whatever guest OS you run in your VM.

I havan't tried any of the other OEM's pre-packaged

VM's (Suse/Novell, RH, Oracle etc....).  Do they come

preloaded with vmtools?

Actually I haven't used any of them either so I'm not sure. I would hope that they do come with VMware Tools installed though; they certainly should.

One thing I noticed with the Browser Appliance was

that it has been the only Linux VM that I have ever

seen that can keep time running as a VM.  Any Ideas?

I don't quite follow the question. Are you saying that the Browser Appliance has no problems with keeping accurate time and you're wondering why? Or something else?

Yes - that is what I am saying.  I've run FreBSD, RH,

Mandriva and multiple other flavors of linux vm's and

have yet to succeed in getting them to maintain any

time sync with the host via the vmtools.  They

constantly drift/loose time.  The only fix that I

have found is to cron ntpd to force a sync in time.

 

So, when I saw that the appliance was able to keep

time with my host (VMplayer running on XP SP2).  I

may have answered my own question.  All the other

linux vm's are running on ESX.  Maybe a windows host

is better for linux guests.  Any feed-back would be

great. 

Ah, I see. I doubt that it has anything to do with Windows host. In fact, running a modern (i.e. 2.6 kernel) Linux guest on Windows hosts presents some challenges, since Windows generally uses a lower system timer rate than recent Linux kernels and this can be problematic for virtualizing time properly. (In general, you need the host timer to be running at least as fast as the guest needs.) If you're interested, I highly recommend reading this whitepaper on timer virtualization, it will probably teach you more than you ever wanted to know:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

Anyway the short answer to your question is that we are always trying to improve our timer virtualization, and in this case I suspect that the improvement you're seeing is due to improvements that have been made in the Workstation 5 code that are not in ESX 2.

Legacy kernel in the 2.x distro of ESX.  I'm dying to

get my hands on ESX 3.0.  I do have a vmtn

subscription - maybe I'll try the newest WS and GSX

on a 2.6 distro of Linux as a host.

Bear in mind that the latest version of GSX (3.2) is roughly the same era of code as ESX 2.x, so you're more likely to see the improvements in WS 5.5.

Thanks for the link to the white paper.

Sure.

Is it possible to install vmware tools in a way that would work in a PXE booted environment?  That is, I'd like to use a virtual machine with no OS installed as a thin client on a network already set up with LTSP.  The PXE boot works fine but the screen seems to be limited to 1024x768 and the keyboard/mouse don't automatically move in/out of the guest screen.

Can anyone give me a hint on getting the tools installed in a linux guest? I downloaded ubuntu from the appliance pages, but find that full screen, the Player menu is in the way at the top of the screen, and I cannot click on it unless I change to a window.  The Host is Windows XP.

I'm assuming the tools will help with this.  Alternatively, is there another way around this?

Ian

Where can I download VMTools?  Do I have to register for an evaluation version of VMWorkstation, or is there another link where I can just get the VMTools ISO from VMWare's page?  I looked around but did not find a download link.  I see this question asked a lot, but I don't seem to see any direct answers.

Thanks!

- Chris