Should I update the vmware tools on the VDR appliance?

[mcwill]

I was a bit suprised to notice the vmware tools on the VDR app were out of date.

1) Should I attempt to update them?

2) Has anyone succeeded in updating them?

Thanks

Iain

[Erik_Bussink]

I've taken the liberty to patch the Operating System of the Data Recovery appliance from CentOS 5.2 to the latest 5.3 with Kernel 2.6.18-128.1.10 using simply the yum update command. I uninstalled the vmware-tools rpm, added the new one.

I then had to create two links for libssl and libcrypto as the libraries have been updated, and the vmware-config-tools.pl could not run, without those libraries.

cd /lib

ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8e libssl.so.0.9.8

ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8e libcrypto.so.0.9.8

My VMware-tools are now up-to-date.

But, this now means I have a DataRecovery appliance that is not the same as what VMware supplies, and I know that I would not be able to open a SR ticket if I had any issues. It's something I'm willing to accept for making sure my appliance is secure and has up-to-date VMware tools.

YMMV

[mcwill]

Erik,

Thanks for the response, it seems strange that the DR appliance would be released with out of date tools.

I'm not sure I'd be as brave as yourself and update the base O/S though.

Regards,

Iain

[dconvery]

One of my peeves about the VMware virtual aplliances is that every one is a different guest OS, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. And there does not seem to be a patching method that they will actully say they support.

Dave Convery

VMware vExpert 2009

Careful. We don't want to learn from this.

Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"

[lamw]

With VMware vCMA vApp the VMware Tools were not the latest either, but I think that was to ensure compatibility between both vCenter 2.5 and vCenter 4.0. If you release a build with a newer set of tools than expected, you would have issues, so it's best to release the lowest level of support to the user and update if necessary. I believe for vCMA, it wasn't necessarily to upgrade if I recall correctly. For vDR, it's only supported on vSphere vCenter 4.0 but the build could have came from varous internal/beta builds prior to GA release ... my guess. If you don't get an answer on the forum you can always file an SR and get an answer through support.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

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[mcocat]

Erik,

How did you remove the previous version of vmware-tools? When I try a "rpm -e vmware-tools" it won't uninstall because vmware-studio-vami is dependent on tools. Also, it won't upgrade the existing tools.

[mcocat]

NM, I got it. For anyone else interested:

The appliance does not inclue the vmware-uninstall-tools.pl script, but you can use the one included with the latest vmware-tools install. You can't use the RPM, so you need to extract from the tar.gz and run uninstall. After that just run the vmware-install.pl script . Done.