VMware Tools on Data Recovery Appliance

[06blade]

Please could someone explain how I upgrade the VMware tools on the appliance machine?

vCentre is reporting the tools out of date, but doing a "Install/Upgrade VMware tools" fails - I assume it needs doing manually with it being linux, but I don't know how to do this.

[AndyShinn]

I would also like to know this... Even more concerning is why wouldn't VMware have used the tools provided in the vSphere distribution? It also shows an older CentOS version (5.2) which leads me to believe VDR was being developed before vSphere tools or ESX were ready.

[Oletho]

I saw an explanation in another thread. Something about a tool that is used for building appliances is not able to support newer virtual hardware until an upcoming update.

Ole Thomsen

[RParker]

Something about a tool that is used for building appliances is not able to support newer virtual hardware until an upcoming update.

Sounds like a cop out to me. They missed it, that's the simple answer. What does newer drivers have to do with newer virtual hardware? It shouldn't, it just a simple driver update.

This appliance is adopted from another company, and they probably migrated to VM Ware without verifying ALL the updates including tools, so during the beta phase it was fine, then they changed the tools last minute to relase vSphere / ESX 4.0 and voila, out of date tools.

I am with the other 2 on this one, they SHOULD be updated, it is just a much cleaner looking product when they ALL look the same.... Another QA process dropped.. There should be no visible errors when a product is released especially with products that ALL shipped together.

[TAMW]

I updated the appliance completly and it still works

• I Updated the aplliance tot the latest Centos Version 5.3 With the command yum: update

• After that the you have to fix some symbolic links because the sfcb server cant start anymore

• Get the new vmware tools .tar add a cdrom player to the aplliance or copy the tar from another source

• Remove the vmware tools manual with the uninstall script. not rpm -e because then you have a dependency problem

• Update the vmware tools manual.

• Ugrade the Vhardware to v7 and remove the flexible nic and add the vmxnet3

Ready.

Running for a couple days here now without any problem.

[AndyShinn]

What is the uninstall script that you are running? My VDR VM doesn't have /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl.

[TAMW]

the uninstall script that is in the new vmware tools .tar file.

[AndyShinn]

What is the place you linked the libssl.so.0.9.8 to? I have tried /usr/lib and /lib and re-run ldconfig. Doesn't seem to pickup the library though.

[Oletho]

I don't disagree that a vSphere appliance should be fully updated, or at least able to be.

But newer drivers does have a lot to do with virtual hardware. Several new vSphere drivers does not install without vm hardware being v7.

Ole Thomsen

[TAMW]

These are the symlinks i repaired:

# pwd

/opt/vmware/lib

# ls -lat

......................

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Jul 11 22:28 libcrypto.so.0.9.8 -> /lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8e

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Jul 11 22:26 libssl.so.0.9.8 -> /lib/libssl.so.0.9.8e

..................

[AndyShinn]

Cool, all working. Thanks TAMW.

Now, you would think VMware would be able to handle this right? Wasn't to painful

[low351]

@TAMW  Thanks I am running VMware Data Recovery 2.0.0.1861 Build 433157

I didn't like the way the tools looked  (they display as "unmanaged"), so I did a snapshot, used yum update to get from CentOS 5.5 to 5.8

Then I recreated the symbolic links you mentioned and uninstalled what appears to be the open vm tools.

yum remove vmware-open-vm-tools-common.x86_64

I found that with a "yum list installed"

There was also an open-vm-tools-kmod but I left that alone as well as vmware-studio-vami packages.

after the open vm tools removed I ran an interactive install, mounted the cdrom and did a manual tools installation.

It appears to have worked.  We'll see how it goes, mind you this isn't a production server so I'm not overly concerned.