Questions[vmware-tools](server)

How can I export one windows instance (with active directory, SQL, SharePoint) from amazon (EC2) to my local environment, and be able run it on a local VMware workstation?

I have used the VMware vCenter converter to do this and I am able to get the virtual machine using the following instructions: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1018015

However, when I try to run it on VMware workstation, the machine doesn't load and I get the blue screen.

Repairing doesn't fix it, and I think the problem is Active Directory.

Any ideas? It is possible to take a clone directly from amazon volumes/virtual disk? Maybe using a different tool?

Thank You in advance.

In an ideal world, configuring puppet to install the open-vm-tools should be as simple as this:

class vm-tools {
    package { 'open-vm-tools':
        ensure => installed
    }
    package { 'open-vm-dkms':
        ensure => installed
    }
}

But, that opens up an ugly can of dependency creep; it installs X, which obviously doesn't belong on servers. As of Ubuntu 10.04, these packages both end up recommending the open-vm-toolbox package of GUI tools:

# apt-cache depends open-vm-dkms
open-vm-dkms
  Depends: dkms
  Depends: make
  Suggests: open-vm-toolbox
  Recommends: open-vm-tools

# apt-cache depends open-vm-tools
open-vm-tools
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libfuse2
  Depends: libgcc1
  Depends: libglib2.0-0
  Depends: libicu44
  Depends: libstdc++6
  Recommends: open-vm-source
  Recommends: open-vm-toolbox
  Recommends: ethtool
  Recommends: zerofree

Recommended packages are always installed by default. It's clearly not desirable to install X dependencies by default when installing a package that is described as "CLI Tools".

The feature request against Debian was immediately rejected for this reason, but cooler heads did not prevail in Ubuntu. It seems that within the last week, there's some recognition that this was an ill-advised change, but that's of no help until the next LTS release rolls around.

The behavior to install recommended packages is easily enough disabled on the command line with the --no-install-recommends option, but through puppet there's no support for doing this, and a tangled mess of tickets requesting that support haven't gone far in 3 years.

The other option is to just disable recommended packages throughout the whole system via apt.conf, which is a massive change to package behavior with impacts reaching further than I'd like.

I've resigned myself to doing it the lazy way;

exec { 'open-vm-tools install':
    command => '/usr/bin/apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends open-vm-dkms open-vm-tools',
    creates => '/usr/lib/open-vm-tools',
}

But this is clearly "doing it wrong". Am I missing something that would make this all work the way it's supposed to, or is this the best hackish workaround to this issue?

We have a deployment with what I would call an Enterprise Cloud Provider. It's VMWare Infrastructure 3.5.x and includes VMotion / VMWare HA instances, etc.

At Provider 1 VMWare Tools was installed:

• vmware-guestd is running and;
• at least two kernel modules are loaded, vmmemctl & vmhgfs

Provider 1 does nightly VM Snapshots.

We are beginning a new deployment at Provider 2 (also an Enterprise Cloud Provider). They did not install VMWare Tools. Provider 2 does not do nightly VM Snapshots but rather file-system backups (using an agent).

From my reading it seems like at the very least VMWare Tools should be installed for the Memory Balloon Driver (vmmemctl) and from reading sources like this one it suggests that certain VirtualCenter management operations also depend upon VMWare Tools being installed in the Linux guest.

Note that all of our instances are headless (default runlevel is 3) and RHEL.

It is hard to find authoritative information on this question and the aforementioned source is somewhat dated.

Can someone shed some light on this? What are the factors/criteria that would lead to an answer in the affirmative or negative?

TIA

Cheers

Is it possible to determine the name of the VMware host (ESX or ESXi) that my guest resides in, from within the guest itself?

I would expect this to be possible via VMware Tools, but am not sure where to look.

Is there a way to get metadata (i.e. VM Name, Annotations, etc.) from within the Guest OS? I'm using a Ubuntu JeOS template and want to run a script on startup which configures new VMs according to the metadata. This is on VMWare ESX.