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Imagine a salt master with salt-cloud configuration and a base image included in vmware which should be cloned (just a fresh installed system, without vmware tools installed). The vmware cloud provider automatically wants to install the vmware tools, which in my case fails after the default timeout of 1200 seconds.

This looks like that:

[INFO    ] salt-cloud starting
[INFO    ] Creating salt-cloud-test.example.com from template(ubuntu1404)
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [0 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [5 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [10 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [15 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [20 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [25 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for clone task to finish [30 s]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Successfully completed clone task in 32 seconds
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for VMware tools to be running [0 s]
[...]
[INFO    ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Waiting for VMware tools to be running [1195 s]
[WARNING ] [ salt-cloud-test.example.com ] Timeout Reached. VMware tools still not running after waiting for 1200 seconds

Currently i'm working on debian based distributions, for which the package open-vm-tools (as vmware supports openvmtools since a while) will do the trick (and we currently ensure that it needs to be present using states, when the minion is up and integrated).

But later on I'll also need windows images to spawn up correctly - so I ask myself how and where to handle vmware tools properly by using the mentioned provider.

Should the vmware tools installation and upgrade be part of the salt-cloud bootstrapping process or does it belong to my configuration management, which takes over control after the minion was created?

I found functions to handle the vmware tools upgrades in this docs, but I don't know if this also distinguishes between openvmtools and vendor vmtools. I also did not find anything on how to tell the provider not to install the tools.

How do you handle this?

dahrens
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1 Answers1

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The cloud provider starts waiting for the vmware tools to finish in _wait_for_ip. The provider needs to get an IP address to be able to additionally bootstrap salt afterwards. Obviously this makes the vmware tools necessary for the provider to do it's job. The provider does not try to install the tools for you at this point!

I've decided to set up initial templates for each OS which come along with the tools already installed.

Afterwards i'll ensure upgrading the tools either by the cloud provider, or using states. Need to test the provider way.

dahrens
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