Changes

A key area where VMware Server differs from many other virtualization solutions is the ability to install a special suite of tools (known as VMware Tools) onto the guest operating system. VMware Tools are available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Netware guest operating systems and are designed to both improve the functionality of the guest within the virtual machine environment, and to enhance interaction between the guest and the host. VMware Tools, for example, allow the guest operating system to be cleanly powered off or reset from the host system, files to be copied between host and guest and guest programs to be remotely launched and killed from the host.

The VMware Tools package comprises four categories of utilities, each of which performs serves one or more specific purposes:

Another responsibility of VMware Tools Service involves the handling of communication between the guest and host operating systems. It is not too unrealistic to make the statement that none of today's popular operating systems have been written specifically to run within a VMware Server virtual machine. As such, none of these guest operating systems are designed to accept and respond to any form of communication from the VMware Server environment. Whilst this isn't generally problem, an issue arises when we consider that the VI Web Access management interface provides the ability to power off, restart and suspend guest operating systems at the press of a tool bar button or menu option, avoiding the need to open a VMware Remote Console session, log into the guest operating system and perform an orderly shutdown or reboot. Since there is no mechanism built into most operating systems that would allow VMware Server to request a clean shutdown or restart, this functionality is instead provided by the VMware Tools Service. When a user, for example, restarts a virtual machine from the VI Web Access management interface, VMware Server notifies the VMware Tools Service running on the guest operating system, which in turn executes the commands necessary to perform a clean and orderly shutdown or restart. In addition, VMware Tools Service also provides a mechanism for administrators to configure custom scripts to be executed within the guest operating system when the power state of the underlying virtual machine changes. This particular topic will be is covered in greater detail later in this the [[Working with VMware Tools Scripts and Power States]] chapterof this book.

In another example of communicationbetween host and guest operating systems, VMware Tools Service is also responsible for ensuring that the system time of the host and guest operating systems are synchronized.

As with the VMware Tools Service, the VMware User Process (''VMwareUser.exe'' on Windows and ''vmware-user'' on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris) runs as a background process and is essentially invisible to the user of the guest operating system. On guest operating systems such as Linux which typically use the X11 session manager (i.e non-Windows systems), the VMware User Process is started automatically and an when a user's X Window session is started. On X Window based systems which do not use a session manager, the VMware User Process may be manually invoked by running the following command:

On Linux, FreeBSD , UNIX and Windows and UNIX based guests, the VMware User Process provides the ability to cut and paste text between the VMware Remote Console and the host operating system desktop environment.

The VMware Tools Control panel, which will be covered in more detail later in this the chapterentitled [[The VMware Tools Control Panel]], provides a user friendly central location within the guest operating system for changing settings relating to VMware Tools , and performing tasks such as shrinking the size of virtual disks attached to the guest's virtual machine.

VMware Tools installation on Linux uses a similar mechanism to that that described in the Windows section above. Once again, an ISO CD image containing the Linux VMware Tools installation files is mounted as the CD/DVD device of the virtual machine running the target guest operating system. The installation can be performed either using a graphical RPM package management tool or from the command line, both of which will be covered in the this section. In both cases, the installation is initiated by logging into the VI Web Access management interface, selecting the target virtual machine from the ''Inventory'' panel and clicking on ''Install VMware Tools'' in the ''Status'' panel of the ''Summary'' workspace.

VMware Tools on Linux involves loading special modules (''vmmemctl'', ''vmhgfs'', ''vmxnet'', ''vmblock'', ''vmsync'', ''vmci'' and ''vsock'') into the operating system kernel. For supported guest operating systems (see the [[Officially Supported VMware Server 2.0 Guest Operating Systems]] chapter for a list) pre-built modules are included with the VMware Tools installations software. If the guest operating system is not officially supported and a suitable pre-built module cannot be found, the VMware Tools configuration script will attempt to custom build a compatible module, for which it will need the GNU C compiler and the appropriate kernel sources. The steps necessary to install these packages differ between Linux distributions.

On most Linux desktops (such as GNOME and KDE) an icon will appear on the desktop when the CD image has been mounted. In addition some Linux desktops will also display a window containing the contents of the CD image. The following figure, for example, illustrates the GNOME Nautilus file manager displaying the contents of the VMware Tools installation ISO image:

VMware Tools can be installed either using the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) archive or via the compressed tar archive (tar.gz) file. To install using RPM doublke double click on the .rpm file in the file manager and use the graphical RPM installation tool as shown in the following figure:

As an alternative to using the graphical RPM installer, change directory to the CD image and run the following command in a terminal window as superuser:

Once VMware Tools has been installed on the Linux system, it must be configured prior to use. This is achieved using the ''vmware-config-tools.pl'' configuration script which is installed by default in ''/usr/bin''. If the installation was performed using the ''vmware-install.pl'' script, ''vmware-config-tools.pl'' will start automatically after the installation is completed. Fro For RPM based installations , the confighuration configuration script will need to be invoked manually:

As indicated above, on systems with a session manager, the vmware-user process will automatically start the next time a user logs into the guest operating system desktop. For systems with no session manager, this process will need to be manually invoked by executing the following command: