open-vm-tools in CoreOS

I’ve been running CoreOS for quite some time now, on VMware platforms for the most part. Recently I’ve been working on PXE-booting the VMs instead of running OVAs though (I’ll explain why in another post).

The main problem with this kind of setup is that open-vm-tools are not available in the official PXE images, since they’re meant to be platform-agnostic.

Various people have attempted to run open-vm-tools in a container instead. After all, that’s how we’re supposed to ship software for those platforms. In particular, https://github.com/godmodelabs/docker-open-vm-tools works pretty well for my use-case.

The only minor detail that bugs me is the fact that open-vm-tools starts running after Docker. For various reason, including the fact that I want to customize the docker daemon based on information that transits through open-vm-tools (which would be an interesting chicken-and-egg problem), I prefer to use rkt for that.

So, my cloud-config looks like this instead:

#cloud-config coreos: units: - name: open-vm-tools.service command: start content: | [Unit] Description=Service for virtual machines hosted on VMware Documentation=http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/about.php ConditionVirtualization=vmware [Service] Restart=always ExecStart=/usr/bin/rkt run --volume systemd,kind=host,source=/run/systemd --mount volume=systemd,target=/run/systemd --insecure-options=image --net=host docker://godmodelabs/open-vm-tools