Installing VMWaretools for vsphere5 on vsphere4 vm's

[drivera01]

We are in the middle of a migration from 4 to 5. We automate the installation of vmwaretools. To make it easy with out have to jump through hoops to come up logic to parse f vsphere4 node versus vsphere5 node.

Is it OK to install the newer vsphere5 vmwaretools on vsphere4.1 based VM's? is there any negative side affects of doing it, or is it just bad idea, and why.

thank you

David

[drivera01]

my environment is mainly linux, SuSe....

[john23]

Upgrading will not cause any issue, still before upgrading take the snapshot of the virtual machine.

Verify the steps:

- Upgrade Tools first

- Then upgrade the hardware version.

[zXi_Gamer]

Is it OK to install the newer vsphere5 vmwaretools on vsphere4.1 based VM's? is there any negative side affects of doing it, or is it just bad idea, and why.

Just to confirm, that your ESXi is still ESXi 4.x and  not ESXi5.  OR you have moved to 5.0 and you have VMS that you have created in 4.1. If the second case, then the VMS will prompt for Out-of-date in summary by default.

If the former is the case, then I used to copy the linux.iso from /usr/lib/vmware/tools*/linux.iso of ESXi5 and copy to the datastore of ESX4.1 and upgrade tools.

[iw123]

vmtools are backwards compatible, so it won't be a problem if you have a VM with tools installed from ESXi5 running on a 4.1 ESX host.

VM Hardware isnt backwards compatible however - hardware version 8 VMs won't run on 4.1 hosts. You would need to keep your VMs on version 7 if you have a mixed ESX environment.  

[drivera01]

until we finish the whole migration to esxi5 from our esxi4.1 environemnt it will be easier from a management perpespective that all vmwaretools be at the same version since this is taken care of by 3rd party automation.

So the vm's on my esxi4.1 clusters would have the vmwaretools based off of esxi5 installed on them .From what I can gather from the posts I should be ok to do it. We hope to complete the migration of to esxi5 in late summer., except for one cluster that may stay on 4.1 a bit longer thus those vms on that cluster will continually keep getting the vmwaretools version based off the most recent update of esxi5 in our environemnt.