Future of OSP packages

[LucW]

Hi all ,

i have upgraded a test server to ESX4u2 . i noticed that the release note mentioning that the RPM installer for Linux guest tools

will become depricated in future ESX releases and that tgz installation are recommended.

this make me wonder what the future is of OSP based installations.

tar installation are only possible when having a compiler on the system. most of my production systems don't have compiler on them and run on minimum footprint

also , a well designed package system can make live and installation so easy ....

currently i'm using ubuntu servers. ESX4U2 says it supports 10.04 latest ubuntu stable release , but OSP packages have missing

dependencies which make them unusable currently. is this a bad sign in the ESX4 eco system ....

luc

[marcelc]

any response from vmware please ?

[DSTAVERT]

Ubuntu supports the VMware tools directly. Just use whatever package manager you use in Ubuntu.

apt-get install open-vm-tools

for instance.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

It will be hard to kill an open source project which OSP is in many ways. You may have to bring this up directly with your sales representative. The forums are not always patrolled by VMware employees. But I just do not see that happening. Most RedHat people will want RPMs.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010

Now Available: 'VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security'[/url]

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[admin]

Luc,

Hello. I'm the manager of the team that builds OSPs.

OSPs are supported for ESX 3.5U2 and upwards, and will continue to be supported. As a general rule, we provide OSPs for commercially supported releases from Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical for the latest ESX releases. Ubuntu 10.04 is a guest OS for which we provide OSP support.

Since Ubuntu 10.04 was released so close to the release for ESX 4.0U2, we were unable to provide packages containing pre-built kernel modules for Ubuntu 10.04 as part of the OSP release for ESX 4.0U2. However, we have provided a working source package that you can use to compile the kmods for your target kernel and generate binary kernel module packages that you can then deploy to your production guests. Note that all other OSP packages for Ubuntu 10.04 were provided as part of the ESX 4.0U2 release. At some point in the future, we'll release the packages containing the pre-built kernel modules too.

If we hadn't done this, customers like you would have had to wait several more months for the next update release (ESX 4.0U3) to get OSPs for Ubuntu 10.04.

We intend to follow this model of releasing an initial set of OSPs without the binary kmod packages in the future as well. This will allow customers to get supported OSPs quicker than they otherwise would.

Please do not follow dstavert's suggestion of installing open-vm-tools if you wish to remain supported. open-vm-tools source or binaries (either acquired from a distro, like dstavert suggested, or downloaded directly from sourceforge.net) are not supported or tested by VMware. Some of the OSP packages that VMware provides have the string "open-vm-tools" in their name, but that doesn't mean they contain source code or binaries built from the open-vm-tools code.

I hope that helps.

Mustafa

[kumar_krishnamo]

You must first build and install the kmod package from source before attempting to install the remaining VMware OSP packages.

Instructions for building kernel modules from source OSP package.

1. Install kernel source package type:

$ apt-get install vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-source

2. Prapare for the build type:

$ module-assistant prepare

3. Build the kernel modules for package, type:

$ module-assistant build vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-source

This step produces .deb file in /usr/src directory by default.

4. Install the produced binary packages, type:

1. module-assistant install vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod

Note:- Steps 2,3 and 4 need to be done with root privilege.

[chertel]

Hello VMware guys,

why don't you just give the process of creating the pre-built kernel module package in the hands of the linux distribution kernel maintainers?

To me this looks like the only reasonable way to always stay up to date with new kernel packages from the distribution as well as the according vmware tools kernel modules.

Besides it is rather annoying to recompile the vmware tools kernel modules each time a new kernel image is released,it also took so many time to redo it again and again for hundreds of linux VMs (we are a hosting service provider).

Regards,

Christian

[gsport]

Kumar,

Thank you for the explicit instructions, that was exactly what I needed to build the kmod package to match the latest Ubuntu Hardy kernel. Just out of curiosity, is this process described anywhere else in the publicly available VMware documentation? Thanks,

Greg

[gsport]

To answer my own question, here's the link to the OSP Install Guide on the vmware website.