Whether VMware Co will refuse me in the official technical support if on the RHEL/CentOS 6.x guest OS I will have open-vm-tools from EPEL repo?

[spezialist]

Hi all!

My the most important question -- is whether VMware Co will refuse me in the official technical support if on the RHEL/CentOS 6.x guest OS I will have open-vm-tools installed from the EPEL repository, rather than native vmware-tools.

Very thanks for the support.

[bluefirestorm]

From the section called "VMware Support Policy" in this VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803

• VMware recommends using OVT redistributed by operating system vendors.
• VMware fully supports virtual machines that include OVT redistributed by operating system vendors, which is done in collaboration with the OS vendor and OS communities. However, the operating system release must be published as certified by the specific VMware product in the online VMware Compatibility Guide.

[spezialist]

Hi bluefirestorm​,

Thanks for the quick response.

I have read the VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803 several times, and unfortunately, the paragraphs mentioned do not give a clear answer to my question. I mean my question about the official technical support from VMware. Where can I get a clear and formal answer to my question?

Very thanks for the support.

[daphnissov]

You must use the HCL to search for your guest OS on the platform you wish to run it. It will show you at the bottom of the list which form of VMware tools are supported. For example, if you wanted to find out if open-vm-tools was supported on CentOS 6.x running on ESXi 6.5 U1, you'd select those combinations.

Click on the support release you have and scroll to the bottom.

You can see for CentOS 6.x 64-bit on ESXi 6.5 U1, open-vm-tools are not officially supported, only the OSP variety and others. If you were to check CentOS 7.x on the same platform, you'd see a different statement.

Here, open-vm-tools is not only supported but is the recommended way to go.

Generally speaking, open-vm-tools is always recommended on newer Linux versions although it will work on older ones as well.

I hope this answers your question.

[bluefirestorm]

I don't know what you are asking anymore as basically it has morphed from "if you use open-vm-tools will you be denied support?" to a generic "will you get technical support?" without specifying what product/licence(s) you have.

I don't even know what VMware product you are referring to as you posted under "Linux". It would be different if you were using a paid licensed ESXi hypervisor versus a desktop product such as Workstation Pro/Workstation Player/Fusion. Each product version also have their support lifecycle schedules.

Assuming that you are entitled to it (either by paid license or through a support contract or by purchase of support packs) and that product/version is still within support lifecycles, then you should be able to get technical support directly from VMware.

FWIW, here are some more links.

Product Support Lifecycle https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/support/product-lifecycle-matrix.p...

For ESXi https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/support/tech-support-welcome-guide...

For Fusion https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/faqs.html

For Workstation Pro https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro/faqs.html#support

[jasnyder]

The official guidance from VMware on open-vm-tools vs. VMware Tools is that you should use the version of open-vm-tools that ships with the Linux distro you're using, not the officially branded VMware Tools.  So they actually prefer you to use that instead of removing it and mounting VMware tools iso and going that route.  If you do a yum update -y and it updates open-vm-tools, that would be considered supported. 

If you try to use a version of open-vm-tools that is not intended for the distro (like say if you grab open-vm-tools from the community repo and put it on RedHat, because you don't want to pay for a RedHat subscription), that would not be supported because you're using the wrong version for your distro.  Even though CentOS is supposed to be the community/free version of RedHat, there are very very often times that libs that get distributed with CentOS do not match what the official RHEL libs are (like version mismatches with glibc, etc.).

So the answer to your question is that they will not refuse the support and they will support you using open-vm-tools (and they actually prefer that you do).  Just make sure your OS is supported and you're not doing anything weird with which open-vm-tools package you're loading.

[spezialist]

Hi community,

Many thanks for providing answers to my question .

From your answers and my practical experience I will try to make a conclusion: VMware Co. will not refuse to provide official technical support even, if using OVT with RHEL/CentOS-6.x (OVT from community EPEL repo or, when OVT is compiled by the customer itself). But on the other hand, in this case, can be refuse official support from RHEL Co. for the reasons given above (use in the distribution of unofficial rpm-packages, for example OVT from EPEL repo). This is also understandable.

I hope, that I correctly formulated the conclusion to my question.

Very thanks for the support.