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Why can't vmware tools be installed through a package manager?

post #1 of 16
2/11/12 at 8:07pm
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seriously.
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post #2 of 16
2/11/12 at 8:15pm
Because VMWare Tools to my knowledge is:
A. Proprietary
B. Specific to VMs

Many distributions refuse to package proprietary packages(CentOS and Fedora come to mind). Also, the fact that its specific to VMs also gives reason not to package it.
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post #3 of 16
2/11/12 at 8:30pm
You can, via these two methods:


There is also the xserver-xorg-video-vmware package, but that probably won't provide anything other than the video driver (obviously).
Edited by randomizer - 2/11/12 at 8:34pm
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post #4 of 16
2/12/12 at 5:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by aweir View Post

seriously.

They can:
Code:
[Plan9@Planet-Express ~]$ pacman -Ss vmware
extra/xf86-input-vmmouse 12.7.0-3 (xorg-drivers xorg) [installed]
    X.org VMWare Mouse input driver
extra/xf86-video-vmware 11.1.0-1 (xorg-drivers xorg) [installed]
    X.org vmware video driver
community/libview 0.6.6-1
    A collection of widgets that were developed at VMware
community/open-vm-tools 2011.12.20-2
    The Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools.
community/open-vm-tools-modules 2011.12.20-3
    kernel modules for the open source implementation of VMware Tools

Obviously I can't comment on whatever kludge of a distro you're running ( tongue.gif ), but they're available on Arch
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post #5 of 16
2/12/12 at 5:57am
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open-vm-tools is NOT the same thing as VMWare Tools. The latter is a more comprehensive implementation, but comes at the cost of a proprietary license.
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post #6 of 16
2/12/12 at 1:32pm
I have a question for the OP. Why do you care so much? How many VMs are you using in VMWARE that this makes a difference? I have 60 RHEL VMs at work, and I just got a vmtools update, so I will be going to every system and at a minimum, telling vmware to facilitate the automatic upgrade, if not logging in and mounting the virtual cd. Updates are a part of system administration, and one of the mundane tasks that come with being a system administrator. This goes for windows admins too.
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post #7 of 16
2/13/12 at 2:00am
Quote:
Originally Posted by kz26 View Post

open-vm-tools is NOT the same thing as VMWare Tools. The latter is a more comprehensive implementation, but comes at the cost of a proprietary license.

Well then the license will determine if it can be redistributed by packagers or not. If not, then you can still get it straight from VMware anyway.
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post #8 of 16
2/13/12 at 12:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by herkalurk View Post

60 RHEL VMs .... going to every system and at a minimum, telling vmware to facilitate the automatic upgrade, if not logging in and mounting the virtual cd. Updates are a part of system administration, and one of the mundane tasks that come with being a system administrator. This goes for windows admins too.

I'm sorry but that's kind of stupid on your part. Logging into 60 machines manually one at a time. rolleyes.gif heck even 6 machines, that's a bad process - not only is it a waste of time, it's also a good window for inconsistencies to sneak in. What if you type the command wrong on machine #46? At the very least you can use ssh in a for loop smile.gif... But you probably want to look at puppet or cfengine http://projects.puppetlabs.com/ http://cfengine.com/ ... stop doing the same thing over and over

I'll add that _good systems administrators are always seeking ways to streamline and improve the mundane tasks, and not just accepting it as part of the job. That's no way to go through life.
Edited by lloyd mcclendon - 2/13/12 at 12:49pm
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post #9 of 16
2/14/12 at 1:09am
Quote:
Originally Posted by lloyd mcclendon View Post

I'll add that _good systems administrators are always seeking ways to streamline and improve the mundane tasks, and not just accepting it as part of the job. That's no way to go through life.

^ that * inf

As perverse as it sounds, a good sys admin is lazy. After all, computers are basically just adding machines used to take repetitive tasks away from humans, so it's completely bonkers to manually run an easily scripted process 60 times. Not least of all to eliminate human error
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post #10 of 16
2/14/12 at 11:44am
Quote:
Originally Posted by lloyd mcclendon View Post

I'm sorry but that's kind of stupid on your part. Logging into 60 machines manually one at a time. rolleyes.gif heck even 6 machines, that's a bad process - not only is it a waste of time, it's also a good window for inconsistencies to sneak in. What if you type the command wrong on machine #46? At the very least you can use ssh in a for loop smile.gif... But you probably want to look at puppet or cfengine http://projects.puppetlabs.com/ http://cfengine.com/ ... stop doing the same thing over and over
I'll add that _good systems administrators are always seeking ways to streamline and improve the mundane tasks, and not just accepting it as part of the job. That's no way to go through life.

Regardless that I don't, because it can all be done with a mouse click, I'm just painting a picture that some things need to be done manually. Also, how would you script mounting the VMware CD and then performing an untar then install with install options? The only way I could think of to do this with a script (attached to a command center or something similar) is to have the data there with the script and mount a cifs or nfs or something, and then run the installation files. Even then, it's a lot of work to create a script that will answer all the questions that arise during the installation all while making sure it's waiting for the porper prompts. And that assumes you don't have oddball systems that require different settings on the Vmware tools.

Also, as for typing the wrong command, it's actually rather hard to do it with auto completion in bash. Untar, run installation perl, and answer questions. I end up doing it quite frequently with new VM's since our template was created months ago, and they have release 3 iterations of the tools since then.
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