Can anyone provide a low tech management freindly summary of the risks of running virtual servers a) without vmware tools, b) with an older version of vmware tools?
And out of interest how regular is vmware tools updated? Is it an optional tool or is it essential? What are the pros and cons of installing it and not installing it?
Thanks
If you don't install the tools, you could have poor VM performance as it doesn't/can't use the best virtual devices (eg. VMXNET NICs only available with tools installed.
Also, VMs might use more resources than with tools installed (no memory balloon driver, for example) which might adversely affect consolidation ratios.
As far as upgrading them goes, I have updated hosts from 4 to 5.0 and havent updated hardware/tools, but thats primarily cos we have a bit of a culture of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". If I needed to upgrade hardware/tools for a specific new device/feature/bugfix, I would, but for the most part a tools upgrade isn't worth the outages I'd need to agree IMHO.
Hope this helps.
Maybe these will clarify your questions.
Running without tools:
Upgrade tools:
Is a VMware Tools Upgrade Required When Upgrading vSphere? | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs
Determine if VMware tools need a reboot:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2015163
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