On 02/23/2010 08:45 PM, Byron Pezan wrote:
i see that you solved your problem, so i'm not attempting to assist, just offering some additional info for the community.
we also had a need for identifying VMware systems, primarily for auto-installing VMware tools. however, using the MAC address was not an option for us as we can and will change MAC addresses on our systems, physical and virtual alike. i opted to use `dmidecode` to check the "Manufacturer" which is something like "VMware, Inc." on VMware VMs. however, there are many other ways to determine if a system is a VMware. for instance `lspci` will report the VGA adapter as "VMware SVGA II Adapter" on VMs as well.
we do our VMware detection outside of cobbler in rc.local so that we can catch VMs and install the tools on first boot. i'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal, but rc.local seemed appropriate at the time. i can provide an example of this if anyone is interested.
Dear Byron,
Thanks a lot for your input, we have similar issues here. Changing MAC addresses only affects virtual VMWare servers but not pysical ones. The main reason why we want to detect virtual systems is to install the VMWare tools on ESX guests and the hardware management software plus the backup-client on pysical hosts.
At the moment ESX guests are recognized very well, but the VMWare-tools are stuck when running vmware-config-tools.pl because the network will be shut down.
This brings me to the point: WHEN should we fire up vmware-config-tools.pl? Obviously not before the final steps but before the reboot after kickstarting has been completed.
Any hints are very appreciated.
Thanks,
Luc