open-vm-tools included/installed by default

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Now that open-vm-tools is in main, the obvious question is whether or not we should include open-vm-tools on the default installation media. While open-vm-tools is not explicitly required anymore for a VM to run properly, it does offer hypervisor integration:

• vmtoolsd: service responsible for the virtual machine status report.
• vmware-check-vm: tool to check whether a utility has been started on a physical or virtual machine.
• vmware-xferlogs: Dumps logging/debugging information to the virtual machine logfile.
• vmware-toolbox-cmd: tool to obtain virtual machine information of the host such as statistics
• vmware-user-suid-wrapper: tool to enable clipboard sharing (copy/paste) between host and virtual machine.

Most users who run a VMware hypervisor want to run some sort of VMware tooling. VMware is now recommending open-vm-tools over the priority tools and several distributions (SuSE/SLES, Fedora/RHEL 7) are now installing these tools by default.

I would like to propose that we ship the open-vm-tools on the desktop and server media and install by default on VMware targets.

~Ben

--       Ben Howard  ben.howard@canonical.com  Canonical  GPG ID 0x5406A866