🔧 What Are VMware Tools?
VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of virtual machines and improves management of the guest operating system.
It provides:
- Better graphics performance and display resolution
- Time synchronization between host and guest
- Improved network drivers (VMXNET3) and disk performance (PVSCSI)
- Ability to gracefully shut down or restart VMs from the hypervisor
- Clipboard and drag-and-drop support between host and guest
🖥️ Why Are VMware Tools Important?
Without VMware Tools, VMs run in a very limited way:
⚠️ Poor responsiveness
⚠️ Limited features (no graceful shutdown/restart)
⚠️ Reduced network and disk performance
With VMware Tools installed, you unlock full integration between the guest OS and the VMware hypervisor.
✅ Supported Operating Systems
VMware Tools supports a wide range of OS, including:
- Windows (Server and Desktop editions)
- Linux distributions (Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, SUSE, Oracle Linux, etc.)
- FreeBSD
- macOS (experimental / limited support, mainly on VMware Fusion or Workstation)
👉 For Linux, VMware recommends using Open VM Tools, which are maintained by most modern Linux distros.
⚡ Upgrade Trick – Without Reboot
You can update the VMware Tools package available on the ESXi host without rebooting the host itself.
This ensures that any future installations or upgrades inside VMs will use the latest version.
Steps:
- Download the correct offline depot ZIP from VMware.
- Upload it to a datastore.
- Run this command directly on the ESXi host:
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