Detect vmware version if no version is specified

[joraff]

I've been intrigued by a method of detecting the esx version from the guest OS ever since I came across this a few months ago:

http://fritshoogland.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/determine-vmware-esx-version-from-linux-as-guest-os/

5.5 is 0xEA050

I'm going to do some chef development over the break - if I get on a roll I might see if this works well, unless someone beats me to it.

[jarosser06]

I was thinking about that last week as a replacement for using a node attribute as a flag.

[joraff]

Not that it's that big of a deal yet - you specify your esx version and it's not needed again after the first run list execution.

Now, it could be very handy when/if upgrading vmware-tools.

[jarosser06]

At the very least "vmware-toolbox-cmd -v" can give both the vmware tools version and the build version which are used in the vmware-tools tarball name. I think we can use this against the VMware-tools tarball to see if the tools version is different.

Also currently we are hosting these tools internally and I have considered that maybe we just need a central repository of packages like this available (vmware tools tarballs, etc). I have been hosting some of this stuff from a personal S3 bucket but it may be beneficial to host something for TAMU.