Comments on: Mass upgrade of VMware Tools in Linux guests http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2010/01/07/mass-upgrade-of-vmware-tools-in-linux-guests/ a technology blog with a focus on virtualization and cloud computing Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:17:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: nate http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2010/01/07/mass-upgrade-of-vmware-tools-in-linux-guests/comment-page-1/#comment-1964 nate Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:32:53 +0000 http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2010/01/07/mass-upgrade-of-vmware-tools-in-linux-guests/#comment-1964 What I do is build my own vmware tools packages. In my case I'm using CentOS so RPMs. I build one generic RPM for the vmware-tools binaries, in the %post part of the RPM I create all of the links depending on the architecture it is being installed to. Then I create another RPM containing the drivers that are compiled against that particular kernel rev. So I don't need to run things like those perl scripts since everything is installed pre-configured.<br><br>Also has the advantage of having a significantly smaller footprint upon installation, my RPMs are 28.5MB, vs 46MB for the original RPM. I strip out the pre-built drivers, the driver source code, all of the X11 related stuff(really none of my VMs run X11) etc.<br><br>And when I install a new kernel onto my systems I can have the drivers built for that kernel in advance and install them along side the new kernel simultaneously, then reboot to get both the new kernel and updated drivers.<br><br>I use alien to make the RPMs, nothing fancy, a couple sample SPEC files from a while back:<br><a href="http://portal.aphroland.org/%7Eaphro/specs/VMWareToolsOnly-3.5.0-123630-2.spec" rel="nofollow">http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/specs/VMWare...</a><br><a href="http://portal.aphroland.org/%7Eaphro/specs/VMWare-esx-guest-drivers-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5-2.i686.spec" rel="nofollow">http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/specs/VMWare...</a> What I do is build my own vmware tools packages. In my case I'm using CentOS so RPMs. I build one generic RPM for the vmware-tools binaries, in the %post part of the RPM I create all of the links depending on the architecture it is being installed to. Then I create another RPM containing the drivers that are compiled against that particular kernel rev. So I don't need to run things like those perl scripts since everything is installed pre-configured.

Also has the advantage of having a significantly smaller footprint upon installation, my RPMs are 28.5MB, vs 46MB for the original RPM. I strip out the pre-built drivers, the driver source code, all of the X11 related stuff(really none of my VMs run X11) etc.

And when I install a new kernel onto my systems I can have the drivers built for that kernel in advance and install them along side the new kernel simultaneously, then reboot to get both the new kernel and updated drivers.

I use alien to make the RPMs, nothing fancy, a couple sample SPEC files from a while back:
http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/specs/VMWare…
http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/specs/VMWare…

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