I have a Linux VM that is locked down by proprietary software from a 3rd-party vendor. The consequence of this is that it's unlikely I'll be able to install any VMWare Tools.
My question is this: is there likely to be a knock on effect to other members of the ESX cluster if this VM is not being managed properly due to the lack of drivers installed by the VMware Tools? If it's only the VM itself that might suffer then, frankly, I don't care. If there's the possibility of affecting other VMs on the host then, yupedee, I do care.
Any comments welcome.
The single biggest downside is that you will not have the vmxnet network driver, which significantly enhances network performance.
Additionally, you will not have the memory balloon driver (not really a problem unless you do heave memory overcommitment in your environment) and better graphics drivers (if you're running X.)
Finally, you will not be able to use features such as graceful guest OS shutdown from within the VI client, or the ability to view items such as the guest's IP address in the VI client.
The single biggest downside is that you will not have the vmxnet network driver, which significantly enhances network performance.
The e1000 emulation on ESX 3.5 is pretty fast, so I don't think this is such a big issue.
Additionally, you will not have the memory balloon driver (not really a problem unless you do heave memory overcommitment in your environment) and better graphics drivers (if you're running X.)
This is a much bigger problem: without ballooning, this VM is likely to bully the other VMs on the ESX host and transform it into a swapping hell.
e1000: Hmm that would require you to manually hack the vmx (unless it's a 64-bit VM) and would still require access to the guest to reconfigure the networking, though...
Thanks for the comments - I'll report back if we see any issues.
