Open VM Tools (OVT) consists of a suite of virtualization utilities that improves the functionality, administration, and management of virtual machines on VMWare hypervisors. This simplifies the deployment of virtual machines on VMware hypervisors. OVT is a set of services and modules that enable several features in VMware products for better management of guests. This will helps the performance of the guest operating system and improves management of the VM’s.
The package vmwaretools is provided by VMware and is only supported by VMware. Few benefits of using open-vm-tool:
- The ability to perform virtual machine power operations gracefully.
- Collect the information of network, disk, and memory usage from the guest.
- Synchronization of the guest OS clock with the virtualization platform.
- Provides a secure and authenticated mechanism to perform various operations within the guest OS from the virtualization infrastructure.
Installing the Open VM Tools
After CentOS/RHEL installation, to install Open Virtual Machine Tools you can use the yum command as shown below.
# yum install open-vm-tools Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb, search-disabled-repos Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package open-vm-tools.x86_64 0:10.1.5-3.el7 will be installed --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ========================================================================================================= Package Arch Version Repository Size ========================================================================================================= Installing: open-vm-tools x86_64 10.1.5-3.el7 rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases 663 k Transaction Summary ========================================================================================================= Install 1 Package Total download size: 663 k Installed size: 2.1 M Is this ok [y/d/N]: y Downloading packages: open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64.rpm | 663 kB 00:00:01 Running transaction check Running transaction test Transaction test succeeded Running transaction Installing : open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64 1/1 Verifying : open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64 1/1 Installed: open-vm-tools.x86_64 0:10.1.5-3.el7 Complete!
Verify
Verify the installation of the package using the rpm command.
# rpm -qa|grep -i open-vm* open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64
# rpm -qi open-vm-tools Name : open-vm-tools Version : 10.1.5 Release : 3.el7 Architecture: x86_64 Install Date: Mon 18 Dec 2017 10:18:42 AM EST Group : Applications/System Size : 2166108 License : GPLv2 Signature : RSA/SHA256, Tue 28 Mar 2017 10:31:54 AM EDT, Key ID 199e2f91fd431d51 Source RPM : open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.src.rpm Build Date : Tue 28 Mar 2017 10:24:06 AM EDT Build Host : x86-034.build.eng.bos.redhat.com Relocations : (not relocatable) Packager : Red Hat, Inc. [http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla] Vendor : Red Hat, Inc. URL : https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools Summary : Open Virtual Machine Tools for virtual machines hosted on VMware Description : The open-vm-tools project is an open source implementation of VMware Tools. It is a suite of open source virtualization utilities and drivers to improve the functionality, user experience and administration of VMware virtual machines. This package contains only the core user-space programs and libraries of open-vm-tools.