Comment 0 for bug 1220950

[Availability] open-vm-tools is currently in universe and has been in Ubuntu since Lucid. It is currently in Debian Main.

[Rationale]: open-vm-tools is the open source method of installing tools for VMware guests. VMware is a popular hypervisor for both desktop and server workloads. VMware is the defacto hyper-visor for some industries, and supporting them by adding open-vm-tools will enable Ubuntu easier.

Further, VMware is promoting the use of open-vm-tools as the preferred way for hyper-visor interaction with Linux. With the 3.9 kernel, the open-vm-tools-dkms is no longer needed for the tools to run.

Starting with Fedora 19 (released April 2013), open-vm-tools ships on CD and installs automatically on appropriate hardware.

[Security]: There have been no CVE's in the last two years, with the latest being CVE-2011-1681 and CVE-2009-2692.

[Quality assurance]:
Debian Main: https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/open-vm-tools
Upstream Bug Tracker: http://sourceforge.net/p/open-vm-tools/tracker/?source=navbar

[UI standards]: N/A

[Dependencies]: All dependencies are from main.

[Background]: For the last several years, there has been the request to include open-vm-tools in the cloud-images. By having this promoted to main, it will allow us to ship with the default image; the main reason for not including this in the cloud image is due to the package provenance.