VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘vmtools’ Category

Installing VMware tools on Linux virtual machines can be challenging compared to installing the tools on Windows VMs. Unfortunately the differences of various different Linux distributions do not allow a universal point and click installer to be created. Each distribution has package dependencies that must be met, and those packages are installed by different means in their respective operating systems.

In my experience a few of the Linux operating systems will complete the tools install without pre-installing the dependencies. SUSE has been one of these distributions. It seems more and more companies are both performing P2V migrations of SUSE servers or building new VMs with the OS. This fact, in turn, means that understanding how to install VMware Tools in the SUSE OS has become a more frequently asked question. I wrote the following tutorial for a client running openSUSE. Although this was written for the open source version, use this post as an example for VMware Tools installation on SLES and other Linux distributions as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The last steps of the VI3 upgrade process involve the virtual machines. Upgrading the VM hardware and the installed VM tools complete the virtual infrastructure migration, but can be a daunting task if you have numerous ESX hosts and guests. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can simultaneously update multiple VMs. One method uses the VI client and the other involves entering a console command on the VirtualCenter server. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the cool things about this blog is I am communicating with and learning from virtualization professionals all over the world. Recently I received an email from a reader in the UK, Mohammad, who notified me of a couple ESX 3.5 upgrade issues he has experienced. One of his issues, and the topic of this post, is a painful example of the need to understand the compatibility matrixes published by VMware before upgrading to VI3.5.

From Mohammad’s email:

“.. I also found some quirks in ESX 3.5 with backward compatibility. I built some Blades BL460c/ESX 3.5 with eva 3000 SAN. Later I put ESX 302 Update1 Build on blades but left VMFS partition (ESX 3.5 Build) intact as it had some VMs on them. These VMs threw some terrible issues with networking in Windows 2003 environment (despite working ok with normal day to day networking ) and it wasn’t until few days after when I discovered that the VMware tools installed from ESX3.5 build were the culprit although no apparantly networking issues were there. Reverting back the Tools versions sorted the problem out.

Morale: ESX 3.5 VMware Tools are not backward compatible on VMs that may [have] to run on [the] ESX 302 platform.”

It’s not as simple as in Windows VMs !

This guide is the combined instructions found from the guides at:

http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_tools_on_linux

http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/howto/fedora-7-vmware-tools-install.html

I started with a fresh install of Fedora 7. I used the LiveCD and installed it to the VM hard disk. I did not apply the 210 package updates or the security updates. (Who says Linux doesn’t have be patched as often as windows?)

Note: I was unable to get the shared folders or the fast network driver feature to work. I’ve never been able to get these features working properly, but I’ve never really needed them to. The VMtools will load without these features anyways. I assumed that the sections for fixing the vmxnet module would finally make this work, but it did not. I might have done something wrong so I kept those sections in these instructions in case someone else gets it to work.

Read the rest of this entry »

After installing VMware tools in a Linux VM, if X windows will not start and you get an error similar to “undefined monitor vmware”, then you need to manually modify the xorg.conf file.

Do the following:

1.      Edit the X config file

#nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2.      Add the lines

Section “Monitor”

        Identifier   “vmware”

EndSection

3.      Restart X

      #startx