[sles-beta] SLES11-SP4 beta2 x86_64 - VMware Tools Again ...

[Mike Latimer]

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 07:22:46 AM Waite, Dick wrote:
> Mike the part I don’t see working in this two horse race is:
> 
> VWware Workstation bring out a 11.2.0 which has Tools at say 9-9-3-123456.
> They control both halves of the interface so they can test this works.

As Allen mentioned, I think the ESX environment is a more important target. 
However, I think it is possible to have tools that work in both environments. 
The versioning difference between VMware Tools and open-vm-tools is 
challenging, but I think VMware is working toward bridging any gaps that might 
exist.
 
> I update to 11.2.0 and try and run with "open-vm-tools", now I know SUSE and
> VMware are good friends but will then let you know in advance whet has
> changed in their update ?

In this case, the confusion is at least largely due to the conflicting tools 
versions. As I mentioned before, the open-vm-tools package was not intended to 
be automatically installed, and I'm taking steps to change that in Beta3.
 
> The other part is, on some systems I run Workstation 10.n for our own
> reasons, this runs grand with VMware tools built with 10.n but which
> version of "open-vm-tools" would I use ? or do you hope the latest
> "open-vm-tools" will fit all the versions of Workstation that VMware
> support ?
 
> I don’t see with what application you (SUSE) would expect "open-vm-tools" to
> run with, maybe knowing that would remove some of the Shades of Grey.

I'm not completely sure I can answer that. There are environments where open-
vm-tools may not be complete enough to fully replace VMware Tools. However, we 
do believe they should work and offer enough functionality that the 
availability of open-vm-tools in the distribution itself is a nice 
improvement. It may come down to you evaluating your environment and 
determining which solution is better suited than the other.

If you have any specific comments or suggestions, I'd be happy to discuss this 
further offline. (Any testing, bug reporting, etc, are always appreciated.)

Thanks again for the comments.

-Mike