VMWare Hardware Version and open-vm-tools

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Hi all,

Just trying to understand the relation between VMWare Hardware Version and open-vm-tools. The VMware KB 1010675 explain how to do it but it does not provide too much information for Linux VM so I am trying to understand if there is any other considerations that I should take.

I copy below part of the KB details:
Before you upgrade the virtual hardware:
1.- Create a backup or snapshot of the virtual machine.
2.- Upgrade VMware Tools. On Microsoft Windows virtual machines, if you upgrade the virtual hardware before you upgrade VMware Tools, the virtual machine might lose its network settings.
3.- Verify that the virtual machine is healthy and available, with no inaccessible virtual disks, CD-ROM or ISO images, etc.
4.- Determine the version of the virtual hardware by selecting the virtual machine from the vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client and clicking the Summary tab. The VM Version label in the Compatibility field displays the virtual hardware version.

Is there any correlation between VMWare Hardware Version and open-vm-tools? and also Redhat version and open-vm-tools? or Redhat version and VMWare Hardware Version? or there are independent of each other?

Thanks in advanced.

ES
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Responses

JB Active Contributor 117 points
14 February 2018 6:20 PM

We've used open-vm-tools on some servers and the standard vmware-tools on others haven't noticed any real difference. I haven't seen any correlation between hardware versions vs open-vm-tools either. We use the latest version unless we run into a problem. We did have an issue with open-vm-tools and the snapshots made by our backup appliance but that was eventually fixed. Here's a nice a KB article from VMware.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2073803

Jörg Kastning's picture Expert 1223 points
15 February 2018 10:05 AM

We're using the open-vm-tools only in RHEL 7.x. So far we have not seen any problems. Some of our VMs run with hardware version 11 and some older once with hardware version 8.

If the VMware Tools are too old you might loose network connection. But I did not encounter such a problem by now.

The guest os you could choose in vSphere Web Client depends on the hardware version. Example: With hardware version 8 the most current RHEL version you could choose is 6. With hardware version 11 you could choose RHEL 7 as well. But this does not really matter because you could choose RHEL 6 in VM configuration and install RHEL 7 anyway.

ES Newbie 15 points
15 February 2018 1:31 PM

Thanks Jason and Jörg for sharing this information. I have open a ticket with Redhat about the virtual hardware just to double check that there is not any problem if I configure a Linux VM with hardware version 11 even if it is a Redhat 4, 5 or 6 as there are information about Redhat 7 but no for the others versions.

In your experienced, have you seen any issues after upgrading the hardware version for the VM? does linux know that something has changed? it seems to me that hardware version is more for VMware to allow yo to have new feature but it does not do anything to the Linux VM unless you are changing any of the old hardware configuration.

Thanks again.

Jörg Kastning's picture Expert 1223 points
15 February 2018 1:53 PM

I could only speak for RHEL 7. So far there are no issues after upgrading the hardware version. But take in advice the Knowledge Base Article you mentioned in your initial post and take a snapshot before you upgrade. If you should encounter any problem you could easily roll back.

JB Active Contributor 117 points
15 February 2018 2:02 PM

We have some RHEL 5, 6 and mostly 7. We haven't had any issues with upgrading the hardware version but always be cautious. I haven't noticed any difference in Linux after an upgrade. I agree with Jörg about snapshots, but I'm not sure if you can "rollback" a hardware version, never tried.

ES Newbie 15 points
15 February 2018 2:15 PM

Thanks Jason and Jörg.

I was doing some test last week and yes, you can rollback a hardware version from your snapshot. But I did not find any logs with the new VM hardware version :-( it seems that Linux does not care about it.

JB Active Contributor 117 points
15 February 2018 2:57 PM

Good to know on the rollback.

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