Werk #9283: VMWare Tools / VirtualBox Additions: Cleaned up installation shipped with firmware

We cleaned up different things related to the VM guest software:

a) The VMWare Tools and VirtualBox Additions which were shipped with the Check_MK virt1 for some time were installed on demand during the first boot of the system into the /rw hierarchy of the device. The files were not installed to the firmware volume and not easily updateable.

We have changed that now. We are shipping the installed tools with the firmware. The appliances are only loading the programs / drivers in case it is needed for the current platform.

b) On debian based distributions it is recommended to use the open-vm-tools instead of the official VMWare tools. So we changed that now to use the open-vm-tools distributed by debian.

c) Automatic updates through the hypervisor. We now disabled the possibility to update the tools through the hypervisor. This had very bad effects on the appliance in some cases. The open-vm-tools can not be updated through the hypervisor at all.

Do reach a clean state, the new firmware will now check whether either the VirtualBox Additions or the VMWare tools have been installed by previous firmware version and will clean up those files from your /rw volumes. If you have updated the tools manually or automatically before, you may have to clean up some more files on your own from your /rw volume.

All in all we have a much cleaner state now that is a lot easier to maintain.

To the list of all Werks