FIX: Cannot boot after vmware-tools installation

Ugh, more SLES 10 SP4 woes!

A bunch of SLES 10 SP4 servers failed to boot after VMware tools were installed. Apparently, initrd did not load the necessary drivers and modules. This was a known issue that was fixed in a later version of vmware-tools.

The VMware tools installer takes apart /etc/sysconfig/kernel, specifically the INITRD_MODULES directive, and reconstructs it by adding its modules (vmxnet and vmxnet3). However, the new configuration removes the rest of the original modules:

- INITRD_MODULES="piix mptspi processor thermal fan reiserfs dm_mod edd"
+ INITRD_MODULES="vmxnet vmxnet3"

and rebuilds the initial ramdisk image with only these drivers. Hence, the server will fail to boot without the other devices.

The workaround in the Novell site was to boot from a rescue disk, reconstruct the configuration file, and run mkinitrd.

To prevent the boot failure, what we did was edit the config file right after the installer finishes. We then run

/usr/bin/vmware-tools-config.pl

to let vmware-tools rebuild initrd -- this time with the correct drivers.

After reboot, it should be good to go.

We also filed a bug report with the vendor regarding this. Note that this does not happen in RHEL, as it doesn't use /etc/sysconfig/kernel for building initrd.