vmware tools "out of date" bad? good? What do I lose?

[ElectroVM]

I'm trying to go from 3.0.2 to 3.5. What functionality do I lose when I have a vm with 3.0.2 vmware tools on 3.5? The status on it just says "out of date".

[gary1012]

It's a good practice to keep the tools in sync with the host. One recent patch was a security patch that fixed a local privilege escalation on Windows OSs through the shared folders function. See VMSA-2008-0009.2.

[wila]

Not ideal I would say, it isn't a critical issue, but if you can then do keep this in sync with your hosts.

The HGFS security issue isn't a problem on ESX as there is no host filesharing, but there is a point, especially if that is a portable VM used on other VMware products.

One of the problems with vmware tools out of date is that you can get all kinds of strange side effects. For example vmware tools also installs drivers for video, disk and network (among others) in your guest. The ballooning driver is also included. Several mechanisms that make managed easier -like shutting down softly, running scripts on shutdown or the inclusion of the vix library- are also part of vmware tools... clipboard integration, smoother mouse integration... shrinking disks and I´m sure my list isn't complete...

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Wil

_____________________________________________________

Visit the new VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[wila]

Oh.. I forgot one of the more important issues... I don't thnk that your VM is supported with an older vmware tools installed. Well maybe it is "supported" but ...

When you contact support for a particular issue, upgrading vmware-tools will be about the first thing they ask you to do.

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Wil

_____________________________________________________

Visit the new VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[rick-vanover]

It is definitely good to keep them up to date, and one feature depends on some of the VMware Tools components.

For example, the new live cloning feature for VI3 requires the LGTO_Sync (file sync service) component of VMware Tools to be running. In obsolete Tools installations, that functionality is not available.