VMWare tools out of date - Urgent, Please help!!

[max2001]

Hi Guys,

I have a production enviroment with 6 ESX 3.5 servers and 40 VMs.

I have rebulit the ESX host to the latest build (still 3.5) and now the VMware tools is out of date on all VMs. We use the vmware tools mainly to sync the time between the VM and the ESX host, therefor, I can't afford any mess here.

The "vmware tools" is still working fine but i'm afraid it is going to stop at some stage.... My question:

How long can I wait for with the vmware tools out of date before anthing goes wrong?

I don't need to update them now as the VM will need to be rebooted and this will mean an outage for some time.

[tlowe]

What happens when you right click on the vm and tell it to update vmware tools

[dominic7]

You can wait an unlimited amount of time. I have ESX 2.5.x tools on VMs and they still function fine.

[max2001]

do you guys have any doco about that?

the customer has raised a call and i need to confirm that there is no frightning impact but i will need something to support my claim.

thanks

[chumeng]

Becareful when you upgrade VMware Tools on SuSE Linux Ent Server and Windows 2003, it may require restart network services or reboot the box.

[dominic7]

I believe if you read the VMware ESX 2.5 -> 3.x upgrade guide it shows upgrading the VMware tools as an optional step. That's probably as official as you're going to get unless you go open an SR with VMware.