Regarding the question: what would the tools get us in a cloud image, here is some more details for you:
Open-VM-Tools is a suite of open source virtualization utilities that improves the functionality, administration and management of virtual machines on VMware hypervisors. Benefits of bundling Open-VM-Tools with the guest operating system: - When Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system, users get the best out-of-box experience to efficiently deploy virtual machines on VMware virtual infrastructure. - Eliminates the need to separately install VMware Tools when Open-VM-Tools is bundled with the operating system because Open-VM-Tools is a fully supported open source implementation of VMware Tools. - Reduces operational expenses and virtual machine downtime because updates to Open-VM-Tools packages are provided with the operating system maintenance updates and patches. This eliminates separate maintenance cycles for VMware Tools updates. - No compatibility matrix checking required for Open-VM-Tools. Adhering to vSphere compatibility matrix for the guest OS release is sufficient. - Open-VM-Tools bundled with the operating system provides a compact foot-print optimized for each OS release. Open-VM-Tools consist of the following three packages: open-vm-tools package This package contains the core Open-VM-Tools user-space programs and libraries, including vmtoolsd, that provide the following features: - Synchronization of the guest OS clock with the virtualization platform - Enables the virtual infrastructure to perform graceful power operations (shut down) and file system quiescing of the virtual machine - Provides a heartbeat from guest to the virtualization infrastructure to support vSphere High Availability (HA) - Publishes information about the guest OS to the virtualization platform, including resource utilization and networking information - Provides a secure and authenticated mechanism to perform various operations within the guest OS from the virtualization infrastructure - Accepts additional plug-ins that can extend or customize Open-VM-Tools functionality open-vm-tools-desktop package This optional package extends Open-VM-Tools with additional user-space programs and libraries to improve interactive functionality of virtual machines when hosted on VMware's Workstation or Fusion products. The following features are enabled by this package: - Enables text copy and paste operation between host and guest (either direction) - Enables drag and drop operation between host and guest (either direction) - Enables guest screen resizing open-vm-tools-devel package This optional package extends Open-VM-Tools with additional user-space libraries for developers and contains: - Libraries for developing vmtoolsd plug-ins - Documentation for the libraries -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1220950 Title: [MIR] open-vm-tools To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1220950/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs