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Open VM Tools

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open-vm-tools is a set of services and modules that enable several features in VMware products for better management of, and seamless user interactions with, guests. It includes kernel modules for enhancing the performance of virtual machines running Linux or other VMware supported Unix like guest operating systems.

open-vm-tools can be found on GitHub.

Official repository of VMware open-vm-tools project

open-vm-tools enables the following features in VMware products:

Contents OVT consists of these packages: open-vm-tools package This package contains the core OVT user-space programs and libraries, including vmtoolsd. These features are enabled by this package: Synchronization of the guest OS clock with the virtualization platform Enables the virtual infrastructure to perform graceful power operations (shut down) and file system quiescing of the virtual machine Provides a heartbeat from guest to the virtualization infrastructure to support vSphere High Availability (HA) Publishes information about the guest OS to the virtualization platform, including resource utilization and networking information Provides a secure and authenticated mechanism to perform various operations within the guest OS from the virtualization infrastructure Accepts additional plug-ins that can extend or customize OVT functionality open-vm-tools-desktop package This optional package extends OVT with additional user-space programs and libraries to improve the interactive functionality of virtual machines. This package depends on X and therefore must be installed only when X is available. These features are enabled by this package: Enables resizing of the guest display to match host console window or the VMware Remote Console Window for vSphere Enables text copy and paste operation between host and guest UI (either direction) Enables drag and drop operation between guest and host (either direction) for the VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion products (not supported on vSphere) open-vm-tools-devel package This optional package extends OVT with additional user-space libraries for use in developing applications using open-vm-tools. The package contains: Libraries for developing vmtoolsd plug-ins Documentation for the libraries open-vm-tools-debuginfo package This optional package contains additional binaries and source code for debugging OVT.

Installing open-vm-tools

There are two methods to installing open-vm-tools. You can either download the rpm file from a ftp site or you cann download the source code and build the project yourself. I started down the path of building the project before I realized there was an ftp site out there that already had the binaries available. So I abandoned building the project and proceeded to use the rpm method.

Using rpm

Open a shell to the Linux system. Enter the following two commands to download the rpm file from the ftp site.

cd ~/Downloads
wget ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/centos/7.2.1511/os/x
86_64/Packages/open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm

The output should look like this:

--2016-05-02 12:58:39--  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/centos/7.2.1511/os/x86_64/P
ackages/open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm
           => 'open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm'
Resolving fr2.rpmfind.net (fr2.rpmfind.net)... 195.220.108.108
Connecting to fr2.rpmfind.net (fr2.rpmfind.net)|195.220.108.108|:21... connected
.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done.    ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done.  ==> CWD (1) /linux/centos/7.2.1511/os/x86_64/Packages ... 
done.
==> SIZE open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm ... 483428
==> PASV ... done.    ==> RETR open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm ... done.
Length: 483428 (472K) (unauthoritative)

100%[======================================>] 483,428      322KB/s   in 1.5s   

2016-05-02 12:59:08 (322 KB/s) - ’open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm’ saved [
483428]

The rpm file is now safely in our Downloads directory. Use rpm to install the package.

rpm -ivh open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64.rpm

The output should look like this:

Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7       warning: /etc/pam.d/vmtoolsd created as
   /etc/pam.d/vmtoolsd.rpmnew
################################# [100%]

Build open-vm-tools

open-vm-tools uses the GNU Automake tool for generating Makefiles to build all sources. More information about Automake can be found here: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/.

Project Build Information

If you are looking for help or additional settings for the building of this project, the following configure command will display a list of help options: ./configure --help Using configure: When using configure in the steps below it is only necessary to call ./configure once unless there was a problem after the first invocation. Building Unix user-space programs:

  1. autoreconf -i
  2. ./configure
  3. Run "make" to build
Unix userland and kernel Packaging: If you are interested in creating a Tools package, please see https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/open-vm-tools/index.php?title=Packaging for more information.

Uninstalling open-vm-tools

If rpm was used to install open-vm-tools, it only makes sense to uninstall open-vm-tools using rpm. To accomplish this, first verify that open-vm-tools was installed using rpm:

rpm -qa vm-tools | grep open-vm
[root@hdcentos ~]# rpm -qa | grep open-vm
open-vm-tools-desktop-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64
open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64

By examinng this list, there appears to be two packages already installed. The names are:

open-vm-tools-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64
open-vm-tools-desktop-9.10.2-4.el7.x86_64

Both of these rpm packages need to be uninstalled. Note: Since the package open-vm-tools-desktop is dependent on the package open-vm-tools, any attempt to remove open-vm-tools before open-vm-tools-desktop will result in an error.

rpm -e open-vm-tools-desktop
rpm -e open-vm-tools

That should remove the packages.