Ubuntu
open-vm-tools package

  1. Bug #1741390
  2. Comment #4

Comment 4 for bug 1741390

Revision history for this message
evade (evade) wrote : Re: Package two years out of date

Hello Christian,

Thank you for your fast response and the explanation.

Despite the difference in release time, I don't see this as a major upgrade but instead a required bugfix to maintain compatibility with another vendor's products.

I work in an enterprise environment and am working on a project building a new network.

We specifically chose an LTS release for our virtual developer desktops because we didn't want developers to have to upgrade their desktops on the normal release cycle.

Sadly we are stuck with VMware's Horizon View (which I wouldn't recommend). As Horizon View's Linux support is still maturing and we're still in the build phase of our Network, we've had to keep up with the latest version of that product. (For example, the latest version allowed us to offer KDE instead of only a GNOME desktop!)

We have to patch VMware software, especially including the ESXi hypervisors for security updates. However VMware don't offer security-only patches, only whole updates.

We're working with a whole matrix of software which we've learned the hard way has to be kept on equal supported versions. Also, as I mentioned previously, we've had experience with out of date VMware tools causing difficult to diagnose problems (like with the virtual NIC driver, for example).

I raised this ticket because a horrid combination of old VMware tools, NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver (Tesla acceleration is required for the number of monitors used) and VMware's Horizon view agent is causing desktop sessions to crash regularly. I've updated all the other software, only VMware tools is now old.

(I'm not convinced that older versions of VMware tools are more "stable" anyway, just that their problems are more likely known!)

I recognise the situation might be very different, but as an example, Red Hat provide the latest stable open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop packages for RHEL even though RHEL has a much older kernel and (many) older packages than 16.04. (We do of course pay them well for their support though)

I'll ask my project manager about investing time in the Backport Process. I'm afraid I have 0 personal time which I could invest in this.

Thanks for your time!