Open VM Tools
Navigation
- VMware
- Documents
- Installing and Configuring
- Using VMware Workstation Player for Linux (Workstation 12 Player)
- Using VMware Workstation Player for Windows (Workstation 12 Player)
- VMware Tools
- Open VM Tools
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:
- The ability to perform virtual machine power operations gracefully.
- Execution of VMware provided or user configured scripts in guests during various power operations.
- The ability to run programs, commands and file system operation in guests to enhance guest automation.
- Authentication for guest operations.
- Periodic collection of network, disk, and memory usage information from the guest.
- Generation of heartbeat from guests to hosts so VMware's HA solution can determine guests' availability.
- Clock synchronization between guests and hosts or client desktops.
- Quiescing guest file systems to allow hosts to capture file-system-consistent guest snapshots.
- Execution of pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts while quiescing guest file systems.
- The ability to customize guest operating systems immediately after powering on virtual machines.
- Enabling shared folders between host and guest file systems on VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion.
- Copying and pasting text, graphics, and files between guests and hosts or client desktops.
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:
- autoreconf -i
- ./configure
- Run "make" to build
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.