The second method, which is gaining traction, is the Open-VM-Tools (OVT) initiative spearheaded by VMware. The drive is then mounted using the mount Linux command whereby a packaged Perl script is used to install vmtools. This package contains all the vmtools binaries (installation files, scripts, etc) which is mounted as a virtual optical drive on the VM. The first and most commonly used method is that of the ISO package. At the end of the post you will find a number of links on how to install vmtools on other Linux variants.ĭepending on the Linux guest OS, there are a couple of methods you can use to install vmtools. Moving on, let’s see how one can deploy vmtools to a couple of Linux distros such as Centos and Debian. The Guest OS Compatibility Guide is the perfect place to discover which guest operating systems are supported. VMware Tools are supported on a number of 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems from vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Netware, Solaris, RedHat and other Linux providers. In addition, the tools provide api frameworks such as VIX allowing you to programmatically manage VMs as well as expose information in vSphere clients, such as a VM’s IP address, that would otherwise be unavailable to the user. In fact, the vmtools package contains virtualization optimized drivers replacing those of the guest OS one such example being the vmxnet3 network card driver. The reason we install vmtools, is to improve VM performance and manageability.

In today’s post, we’ll have a look at how to deploy VMware Tools (vmtools) to virtual machines running Linux as the guest OS.

Install vmware tools linux