Should I use open-vm-tools instead of vmware-tools solaris?

[AveryFreeman]

Hi,

Here's what I'm using:

root@napp-it01:~# cat /etc/release                                           
  OmniOS v11 r151028r                                                         
  Copyright 2017 OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved.       
  Copyright 2017-2019 OmniOS Community Edition (OmniOSce) Association.       
  All rights reserved. Use is subject to licence terms.

root@napp-it01:~# uname -a                                                   
SunOS napp-it01 5.11 omnios-r151028-3aeadc46d9 i86pc i386 i86pc illumos

just a general question - maybe someone knows better than I do:

VMware themselves recommend using open-vm-tools from package repo rather than vmware-tools.iso for a variety of reasons: Using Open VM Tools

With the caveat that it is only supported on certain systems:

List of operating systems with open-vm-tools

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 and later releases
• SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 and later releases
• Ubuntu 14.04 and later releases
• CentOS 7 and later releases
• FreeBSD 10.3, 10.4 & 11.1
• Debian 7.x and later releases
• Oracle Linux 7 and later
• Fedora 19 and later releases
• openSUSE 11.x and later releases[/code]

Of which, Solaris is not listed, let alone Illumos variants.

I just noticed when looking in pkg that open-vm-tools is available for OmniOS:

root@napp-it01:~# pkg search open-vm-tools                                   
INDEX      ACTION VALUE                                      PACKAGE         
basename   dir    usr/lib/open-vm-tools                      pkg:/system/virtu
ization/open-vm-tools@10.3.0-151028.0                                         
basename   dir    usr/share/open-vm-tools                    pkg:/system/virtu
ization/open-vm-tools@10.3.0-151028.0                                         
pkg.fmri   set    omnios/system/virtualization/open-vm-tools pkg:/system/virtu
ization/open-vm-tools@10.3.0-151028.0

Should I be using open-vm-tools rather than the vmware-tools from solaris.iso? (I'm on 10.25.0 if that makes a difference).

 

[gea]

For OmniOS and OpenIndiana, I just use the open-vm-tools from the OS repositories.
For Solaris 11.4 open-vm-tools are not in the repository. VMware tools from ESXi 6.7U1 are suited then and adapted to Solaris 11.4.