With the release of AOS 5.0 one of the many features we added was the unattended (silent) installation of the Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). This might seem like something small but for most of us out there automation is king so I took the time to have a quick go to see how easy the install is.

The Nutanix guest tools (NGT) is the Nutanix equivalent to the VMware Tools, Microsoft Integration Services or XenTools. It’s a bundle of software that can be installed into the VM operating system to enable some additional functionality. 

The NGT has a couple of components that are used for the following services:

• Nutanix Guest Agent (NGA) service. Communicates with the Nutanix Controller VM.
• File Level Restore CLI. Performs self-service file-level recovery from the VM snapshots. 
• Nutanix VM Mobility Drivers. Facilitates by providing drivers for VM migration between ESXi and AHV, in-place hypervisor conversion, and cross-hypervisor disaster recovery (CH-DR) features.
• VSS requestor and hardware provider for Windows VMs. Enables application-consistent snapshots of AHV or ESXi Windows VMs. 
• Application-consistent snapshot for Linux VMs. Supports application-consistent snapshots for Linux VMs by running specific scripts on VM quiesce.

You can mount the NGT from PRISM or via CLI, via Prism you can mount the NGT via the following menu:

Via CLI you can execute the following command:

Until now the installation of the NGT was a manual job and with multiple VMs depending on these services. With the newest release this is no longer needed, the NGT are now ready to be installed unattended. The setup itself is straightforward, either download the package from our support site or mount the NGT and copy the files/folders from the mounted CD-ROM drive.  After that you can execute the following command to have a quiet/unattended installation of the NGT:

Looking at the cmdline it’s not too complicated, the only specific switch is the location of the logfile, if you don’t apply that the logs for the installation will be directed to %TEMP%. 

Executing this command will result in the installation of the Nutanix Guest Tools and the Nutanix VM Mobility:

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

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