Comment 4 for bug 1220950

Regarding the question: what would the tools get us in a cloud image, here is some more details for you:

Open-VM-Tools is a suite of open source virtualization utilities that improves the functionality, administration and management of virtual machines on VMware hypervisors.

Benefits of bundling Open-VM-Tools with the guest operating system:

- When Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system, users get the best out-of-box experience to efficiently deploy virtual machines on VMware virtual infrastructure.
- Eliminates the need to separately install VMware Tools when Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system because Open-VM-Tools is a fully supported open source implementation of VMware Tools.
- Reduces operational expenses and virtual machine downtime because updates to Open-VM-Tools packages are provided with the operating system maintenance updates and patches. This eliminates separate maintenance cycles for VMware Tools updates.
- No compatibility matrix checking required for Open-VM-Tools. Adhering to vSphere compatibility matrix for the guest OS release is sufficient.
- Open-VM-Tools bundled with the operating system provides a compact foot-print optimized for each OS release.

Open-VM-Tools consist of the following three packages:

open-vm-tools package

This package contains the core Open-VM-Tools user-space programs and libraries, including vmtoolsd, that provide the following features:

- Synchronization of the guest OS clock with the virtualization platform
- Enables the virtual infrastructure to perform graceful power operations (shut down) and file system quiescing of the virtual machine
- Provides a heartbeat from guest to the virtualization infrastructure to support vSphere High Availability (HA)
- Publishes information about the guest OS to the virtualization platform, including resource utilization and networking information
- Provides a secure and authenticated mechanism to perform various operations within the guest OS from the virtualization infrastructure
- Accepts additional plug-ins that can extend or customize Open-VM-Tools functionality

open-vm-tools-desktop package

This optional package extends Open-VM-Tools with additional user-space programs and libraries to improve interactive functionality of virtual machines when hosted on VMware's Workstation or Fusion products. The following features are enabled by this package:
- Enables text copy and paste operation between host and guest (either direction)
- Enables drag and drop operation between host and guest (either direction)
- Enables guest screen resizing

open-vm-tools-devel package

This optional package extends Open-VM-Tools with additional user-space libraries for developers and contains:
- Libraries for developing vmtoolsd plug-ins
- Documentation for the libraries