Comment 15 for bug 1741390

Revision history for this message
evade (evade) wrote : Re: Package two years out of date

Hello Christian,
Thank you for your work on this! Sorry to hear about build problem. I hope it's not difficult to resolve. I am looking forward to trying this.

I do not feel this is a "comfort feature" but instead a compatibility requirement for Xenial to be supported on the latest ESXi 6.5 update(s). If there are any problems on our Ubuntu VMs and I raise a support ticket with VMware, they will insist we update VMware tools before working further. I also have a specific problem I mentioned in the original post, but I won't know the impact on that until I can try an updated version.

The VMware article you linked is out of date. Note that even though the whole page was updated on May 30th 2017, if you read the "Update History" section, the actual content changed last in December 2015.

The advice I've read from VMware [1] is to always use a vendor's open-vm-tools package.
That advice is linked from their first announcement of planning to release Open-VM-tools [2]. Apparently the same advice is also displayed if you try to install VMware Tools directly from ESXi [3]!

I briefly tried to compile the open-vm-tools package from VMWare's github page, but it failed. I'm a sysadmin responsible for multiple systems aside from these Ubuntu desktops. As soon as I recognized that I needed an updated open-vm-tools package I knew either I'd be maintaining the package for our Ubuntu systems forever, or I could ask the distribution to update this vendor-required component. I cannot be the only person affected by this [4]!

Thank you again.

[1]: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2073803 (VMware support policy section)
[2]: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/09/open-vm-tools-ovt-the-future-of-vmware-tools-for-linux.html
[3]: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/VMware_Tools_or_open-vm-tools (VMware Tools section)
[3]: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/547675