What happened with the VM Tools ISO

[Peter VARGA1709157052]

I was now installing a test VM on 8.2.0 and I cannot find the ISO for the VM tools. I am for more than 7 years a Citrix user and usually the link [informing that VM Tools are not installed] in XenCenter opened an alert which inserted the ISO into the CD drive of the VM and the tools could be installed very simple.

 

Now the link which is opened from XenCenter confuses me a lot. I read there that

1. some archive must be downloaded,
2. extracted,
3. copied via a shared drive to the VM and
4. execute the script.

 

My question: Please, tell me I am blind and the ISO is somewhere and what I read is a Halloween joke which didn't land. I hope I am really wrong and someone of you guys can show me the real page where the link for the ISO is available. Of course, I know how to create an ISO from a folder but what is the next step? Forking the current Hypervisor branch from Github and compiling it with gcc before it can be installed?

 

Was the previous solution which inserted the ISO in the VM CD drive too complicated, who approves such decisions?

[Alex Brett1709155963]

The tools ISO has indeed been removed in Citrix Hypervisor 8.2, as per the release notes (https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-hypervisor/whats-new.html) under the "Disaggregation of the Citrix VM Tools" section.

 

By unbundling the tools ISO from the host, it allows separating the release workflow of the Windows and Linux tools from the core product, and avoids the need for issuing hotfixes to update the tools ISO etc. In the Windows case, the drivers can be obtained from Windows Update (for licensed customers), and we are hoping long-term to be able to get the Linux tools upstreamed into the major distributions so they will be available from their package repositories.

 

As it stands for Linux VMs, you will need to download the tarball, and use it in the guest (there is no need to create an ISO from it, you can simply download it straight into the guest and use it there).

[Tobias Kreidl]

OK, interesting change. Always good to read the release notes.

[Peter VARGA1709157052]

3 minutes ago, Tobias Kreidl said:

OK, interesting change. Always good to read the release notes.

 

That's what I thought when I read alexbre's answer.

[sean Hulbert1709159935]

The flaw I see here is that if you want your systems to remain offline with no internet access (Guest), you can't you have to go online to run the YUM or MSI installers or create a share drive and place the tools on there; this opens up so many deltas of malware and unsecured communication. 

I see people just downloading the ISO making a bundle and placing it on the Xenserver as it use to be, however you are forced to create a NFS/CIFS share to get the install to the Guest OS if you want to keep them from accessing the internet. 

 

I get it, they want to remove hotfixes, but from a security stand point it opens the doors a bit to allow bad things to happen. 

 

well that is my two cents of paranoia.