Re: [gentoo-user] Which 'tools' package for VMware DomU?

[Mike Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>]

On 3/30/2011 2:57 PM, Mike Edenfield wrote:
> On 3/30/2011 12:55 PM, Pandu Poluan wrote:
>> Hello, list!
>>
>> I want to deploy some Gentoo-based VMs on VMware. From portage-search,
>> I see some 'tools' related to VMware, namely:
>>
>> * vmware-tools
>>
>> * open-vm-tools
>>
>> * open-vm-tools-kmod
>>
>> What are the differences? And which one should I use if I want to use
>> VMware's PVSCSI and VMXNET?
> 
> As I understand things, open-vm-tools is just an open-source version of
> vmware-tools, but uses the same code base and is managed by VMWare. Both
> of them should have the modules you want. Unless you have a compelling
> reason to use the pre-built stuff from the vmware-tools tarball I'd go
> with the open-vm-tools one.

Teach me to read more carefully...

The specific modules you mentioned are included in your kernel already,
assuming you are using at least a 2.6.34 kernel. You'll still want to
install open-vm-tools, which installs the other modules via
open-vm-tools-kmod, like vsock and vmci, plus the user-space daemon.

Device Drivers  -->
  [*]   Misc devices  --->
    <M>   VMware Balloon Driver
  SCSI device support  --->
    [*]   SCSI low-level drivers  --->
      <*>   VMware PVSCSI driver support
  [*]   Network device support
    <M>   VMware VMXNET3 ethernet driver

(That first one is the vmmemctl driver, which helps improve the memory
management between host & guest).

--Mike