Open-vm-tools/Vmtoolsd

Vmtoolsd is a systemd service, using which we can set guestinfo properties metadata, userdata and vendordata etc., which in turn are consumed by cloud-init. VMwareGuestInfo Datasource uses this guestinfo properties and applies them to the system.

vmware-rpctool is a utility provided by open-vm-tools to set metadata, userdata and vendordata. vmware-rpctool provides info.set and info.get options to set and get the guestinfo properties respectively.

Debugging

To check the status of the vmtoolsd service (vmtoolsd is dependant on vgauthd), run the following commands:

$ systemctl status vmtoolsd vgauthd

$ journalctl -u vmtoolsd

$ journalctl -u vgauthd

To set and get metadata, userdata and vendordata, run the following commands:

$ /usr/bin/vmware-rpctool 'info-get guestinfo.metadata'

$ /usr/bin/vmware-rpctool 'info-get guestinfo.userdata'

$ /usr/bin/vmware-rpctool 'info-get guestinfo.vendordata'

A YAML file can be used as input to the rpctool using following commands:

vmware-rpctool "info-set guestinfo.userdata.encoding base64"
vmware-rpctool "info-set guestinfo.metadata.encoding base64"

vmware-rpctool "info-set guestinfo.metadata ${metadata file contents}"

vmware-rpctool "info-set guestinfo.userdata ${userdata file contents}"

Note:Include the cloud-init log tarball and the vmtoolsd logs when you raise an issue.

1. Collect cloud-init log tarball by running the cloud-init collect-logs command.
2. Collect the vmtoolsd logs from /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log file.
3. Attach the logs collected to the issue ticket.