Running an old vmware tools version impact

[TraianC]

Hello,

Can anyone please tell me what is the impact of running an old version of vmWare Tools?

Thank you.

[abhilashhb]

There is no impact if you run older version of tools. Its just that if you face a issue and contact support the firts thing they will ask you to do is update tools for the latest version.

Check this link Running older versions of Virtual Machine Tools on newer versions of ESX hosts | VMware Support Insi...

[dhanarajramesh]

in my production i have faced issue with older tools that cannot do vmware  snapshot  consolidation with quiesce option. once I updated and the issue was solved.

[tomtom901]

That would mean using a way older version, most VMware Tools updates just add drivers for (virtual) hardware, the basis is already covered.

[admin]

For vSheild products to work better with the VMs VMware recommends tools and VM hardware to be the latest.

~dGeorgey

[TraianC]

OK. I figured out how to keep my vmWare Tools on my vSphere environment up to date, just adding the "Update on Power Cycle" option to my virtual machines. But I have another cluster that is running vCloud Director. Can I use the setting that I used on my vSphere environment, or this will break my vCloud machines?

[tomtom901]

Best would be to do this in a small maintenance window, just to be sure.

[TraianC]

Tested this on vCloud test cluster. No success. Does someone know is there a way to force update of VMware Tools in vCloud?

[dhanarajramesh]

i found one good reason that,  in RED LINUX server, if you upgrade esxi 5.0 vmware tools to latest, the network adapter will be upgraded from VMXNET to VMXNET3.