VMware 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 operating systems. If VMware Tools is not installed in your guest operating system, guest performance lacks important functionality.
Without VMware Tools you will find below issues with the Guest Operating System -
Low video resolution
Inadequate color depth
Incorrect display of network speed
Restricted movement of the mouse
Inability to copy and paste and drag-and-drop files
Missing sound
Provides the ability to take quiesced snapshots of the guest OS
Synchronizes the time in the guest operating system with the time on the host
VMware Tools mainly consists of below 4 components:
VMware Tools service - Handles communication between the guest and host operating system.
VMware device drivers - Which provides the drivers for many virtual hardware’s including Network adapters.
VMware user process - Provides the ability to copy and paste text between VMware Remote console and Host Operating system.
VMware Tools control panel - Configuration utility to configure VMware Tools
VMware Tools are typically forward and backward compatible with several product releases and are provided in below formats:
ISOs (containing installers) - These are packaged with the product and are installed in a number of ways, depending upon the VMware product and the guest operating system installed in the virtual machine. VMware Tools provides a different ISO file for each type of supported guest operating system: Mac OS X,Windows, Linux, NetWare, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) - Downloadable binary packages that are built and provided by VMware for particular versions of Linux distributions. OSPs are typically available for older releases, such as RHEL 6. Most current versions of Linux include Open VM Tools, eliminating the need to separately install OSPs.
Open VM Tools (OVT) - This is the open source implementation of VMware Tools intended for Linux distribution maintainers and virtual appliance vendors. OVTs are generally included in the current versions of popular Linux distributions, allowing administrators to effortlessly install and update VMware Tools alongside other Linux packages.
With this, I'll wrap up this post here.
In the next blog post we will see How to Install VMware Tools.
Thank you for reading!
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