I’ve seen this misconfiguration in many virtual environments, when installed OS on virtual machine do not match with Guest Operating System version specified in virtual hardware settings. When I asked why is that so the answer was usually – it is not important. WOOOT !!!
Guest OS baseline on VM
In fact it is very important. Guest Operating System version in virtual machines is a, I would say, virtual hardware baseline. Based on some of the virtual hardware features are supported on certain version of operating systems, some not.
Examples:
- Hot-Plug devices, setting up the right version of OS in virtual machine properties either enable or disable Hot-Plug. Setting up wrong OS type might cause system outage (bluescreen) or problem with OS boot up. Especially in VM’s with windows installed. Try to change on VM with windows 2008 R2, OS version for SUSE Linux – it wont boot up unless you change Os version back to windows 2008 R2
- VMware tools version, can’t install VMware tools from Linux OS onto Windows OS and vice versa.
Windows VMware tools installation package on CentOS Linux
Long story short, make sure that VMware Guest OS matches operating system version installed on virtual machine to avoid problems with virtual machines.
