FreeBSD is my favorite operating system. All my FreeBSD servers (except embedded systems on physical microcomputers) run as virtual machines. VMware officially supports FreeBSD as GuestOS, so nothing stops virtualizing FreeBSD even for production use.
VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves its management of the virtual machine. Although the guest operating system can run without VMware Tools, you would lose important functionality and convenience. In other words, VMware tools are not necessary but highly recommended to use on virtual machines running on top of VMware ESXi hosts.
There are multiple options for how to install VMware tools on FreeBSD, but I personally use Open VM Tools native FreeBSD package as using Open VM Tools is actually the latest VMware's recommendation for unix like systems which is the case of FreeBSD. The reason why I use Open VM Tools instead of VMtools delivered by VMware on ESXi hosts or VMware download sites is that I can use the default FreeBSD package management system (pkg) for simple deployment. It is fast, convenient, and fully integrated with standard operating system updates and upgrade procedures.
As you can see below, the installation on FreeBSD 10.x and above is very straightforward. It is a single command to install the open-vm-tools package and 5 lines in the FreeBSD system config file.
# You have to switch to the administrator account (root)
su -l root
# and unattended install of Open VM Tools by FreeBSD package manager
VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves its management of the virtual machine. Although the guest operating system can run without VMware Tools, you would lose important functionality and convenience. In other words, VMware tools are not necessary but highly recommended to use on virtual machines running on top of VMware ESXi hosts.
There are multiple options for how to install VMware tools on FreeBSD, but I personally use Open VM Tools native FreeBSD package as using Open VM Tools is actually the latest VMware's recommendation for unix like systems which is the case of FreeBSD. The reason why I use Open VM Tools instead of VMtools delivered by VMware on ESXi hosts or VMware download sites is that I can use the default FreeBSD package management system (pkg) for simple deployment. It is fast, convenient, and fully integrated with standard operating system updates and upgrade procedures.
As you can see below, the installation on FreeBSD 10.x and above is very straightforward. It is a single command to install the open-vm-tools package and 5 lines in the FreeBSD system config file.
# You have to switch to the administrator account (root)
su -l root
# and unattended install of Open VM Tools by FreeBSD package manager
pkg install -y open-vm-tools-nox11
To run the Open Virtual Machine tools at startup, you must add the following settings to your /etc/rc.conf
sysrc vmware_guest_vmblock_enable="NO"
sysrc vmware_guest_vmhgfs_enable="NO"
sysrc vmware_guest_vmmemctl_enable="YES"
sysrc vmware_guest_vmxnet_enable="YES"
sysrc vmware_guestd_enable="YES"
... and reboot the server.
Easy, right?
And just for your information, Open VM tools is set of four kernel modules (vmemctl, vmxnet, vmblock, vmhgfs) and one daemon (guestd).
vmemctl is a driver for memory ballooning
vmxnet is paravirtualized network driver
vmhgfs is the driver that allows the shared files feature of VMware Workstation and other products that use it. This is not optimal to use on the server therefore we do not enable it.
vmblock is block filesystem driver to provides drag-and-drop functionality from the remote console.
vmemctl is a driver for memory ballooning
vmxnet is paravirtualized network driver
vmhgfs is the driver that allows the shared files feature of VMware Workstation and other products that use it. This is not optimal to use on the server therefore we do not enable it.
vmblock is block filesystem driver to provides drag-and-drop functionality from the remote console.
VMware Guest Daemon (guestd) is the daemon for controlling communication between the guest and the host including time synchronization.
On Windows and Supported Linux Distributions exists other VMtools modules/drivers but those are not supported on FreeBSD. For further information about all VMtools components look at
1 comment:
Thanks! Worked great ( esxi 6.7 ), exactly the info I needed.
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