Install open-vm-tools - permanent?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi all,

I am still toying with TrueNAS Scale, currently inside ESXi 7.0. I could apt install open-vm-tools and that seems to have survived one TrueNAS update.
Are things going to stay that way?

Thanks,
Patrick

 

[FosCo]

With iperf3 each update killed it. Same with docker enable in systemctl. Maybe I'm assuming a different concept here?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You are right, the package is no longer installed after the update.
The ESXi UI was lying ;)

 

[morganL]

Thanks Patrick,
Can you describe the key benefits and make it a suggestion for integration.
How do you plan to use SCALE as a VM and what problem does these tools solve for you?
Would we better off packaging it as part of a VMDK for VMware deployments? Are there volunteers for actively testing this?
Or... would we better off trying to work out a method for adding any 3rd party package?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I am just experimenting with Scale and have a setup mirroring what people have been doing with FreeNAS/Core for quite a while. Boot in VMware, use PCI passthrough for the disks. So I can run an ESXi hypervisor and Scale on a single machine. My production systems are all FreeNAS or Core.

Surprised by the question about the benefit Clean shutdown? FreeNAS comes with VMware and VirtualBox guest tools if I am not mistaken.

And no, no need for a ready made VMDK. Anyone who wants to do such an installation should be savvy to boot the ISO and install ... IMHO.

Kind regards,
Patrick

 

[morganL]

Using ESXi hypervisor and SCALE on a single machine is an interesting configuration.... even if not intended.
I always ask questions about benefits..... The benefit I expected to be most significant, is not always the one correct one. It's a learning process and it helps us work out what the options are. Thanks for helping my process.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Well, for development and testing that should always be an option. I have been running entire OpenStack clusters in VMware Fusion on my laptop - 1 management, 2 compute, 1 network node. And deployed VMs in it.

So why shouldn't ESXi be a suitable environment to even deploy a couple of Scale instances and test the scaleout features?

Kind regards,
Patrick

 

[Herr_Merlin]

My colleagues and I plan to test multiple ESXi with truenas scale to build it as hypercoverged..
If that works we would be a huge uplift.
As by all means TRUENAS is not a solution to run VMs compared to ESXi.
Otherwise if that's not working as we need to we will build the old way with dedicated storage and ESXi as compute

 

[morganL]

My colleagues and I plan to test multiple ESXi with truenas scale to build it as hypercoverged..
If that works we would be a huge uplift.
As by all means TRUENAS is not a solution to run VMs compared to ESXi.
Otherwise if that's not working as we need to we will build the old way with dedicated storage and ESXi as compute

Apart from open-vm-tools..... what else is needed to do this? Perhaps start a thread and let everyone know what the issues are.

 

[morganL]

I am still toying with TrueNAS Scale, currently inside ESXi 7.0. I could apt install open-vm-tools and that seems to have survived one TrueNAS update.
Are things going to stay that way?

Patrick, Initial review seem to indicate that this (open-vm-tools) can be added for the 20.12 release (December). Might be available earlier in the Nightlies. Look for it in the developer notes.

 

[ornias]

@morganL Can we get some option to just feed it extra software to keep up-to-date and installed via apt-get?
Something simple under advanced settings like "custom apt-get packages", with a box besides it.

I think that would eleviate some of the general issues people are having with packages.

 

[morganL]

@morganL Can we get some option to just feed it extra software to keep up-to-date and installed via apt-get?
Something simple under advanced settings like "custom apt-get packages", with a box besides it.

I think that would eleviate some of the general issues people are having with packages.

For this package (open-vm-tools), we prefer to make it part of the standard SCALE software. It's easy to add an integrate and have value for many users. There are no interaction with other software.

A generalized solution would be difficult, because a package may not play nicely with the rest of the software. Do you know how to solve/manage that problem?

 

[ornias]

A generalized solution would be difficult, because a package may not play nicely with the rest of the software. Do you know how to solve/manage that problem?

Thats always a risk, It should be somewhere under advanced settings with a big-fat warning. ;-)
It's more to ensure people don't loose custom packages on update, than to actually endorse the use of them...

 

[morganL]

Lets find another example of a must-have custom package and see how we should handle.
The big challenge with customization is the support time when people run into issues and don't realize it's the 3rd party package causing the problem and don't tell anybody about them when they report the issue. There will be no testing on updates.... so things can break.

If possible, run the custom packages in a container... if not, make it a feature request. Even better, join the developers on slack and contribute.

 

[morganL]

Patrick, Initial review seem to indicate that this (open-vm-tools) can be added for the 20.12 release (December). Might be available earlier in the Nightlies. Look for it in the developer notes.

The support for open-vm-tools (for ESX) and similar packages for KVM/Xen, Amazon, and Azure have been added to 20.12. So SCALE can run as a VM. It should also be good for Kubernetes and containers, but we don't expect virtualization on virtualization to work due to nesting issues.

 

[ornias]

@morganL As adviced by https://www.cisecurity.org/benchmark/docker/
You might want to include "auditd" package, to watch (and warn) for changes to certain files and might even want to run it by default watching (for example) the docker config file)