Re: Should open-vm-tools appear as a running (possibly unmanaged) in the VMware Tools status of vSphere Client?

[Marcelo V. <mv...@vm...>]

Hi John,

On 07/26/2011 08:43 AM, John Wolfe wrote:
> Our OSR6 efforts are starting with generation of the VM on
> ESX 4.0 which offers guest OS types for "SCO OpenServer 5" and
> "SCO UnixWare 7", but nothing for OpenServer 6.

The identifier provided by the guest os is, mostly, used for the UI only. The
other uses are for features that wouldn't support SCO anyway, so having it not
completely accurate wouldn't really be a problem aside from the cosmetic issue.

The warning you saw in hostd's logs is because it expects the guest to provide
exactly the same string it has in its internal table; looking at the ESX 4.0
sources it seems there are three flavors of SCO: openserver5, openserver6 and
unixware7. I don't know for sure but my guess is that they are case-sensitive.
They're also not marked as fully supported, although I don't know if that flag
affects anything in the UI (e.g. whether to show the OS when setting up a new VM).

But none of this fixes the original bug that was fixed on ESX 5.0, where the
Tools status would be incorrectly reported for OSes that don't have official
VMware Tools packages. So I can't really tell you what the exact behavior there
would be, because I don't know.

-- 
- Marcelo