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bassresponse
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Purpose of VMware Tools in a Linux guest?

Are there any advantages to installing VMware tools in a Linux headless/command line only VM?  The only things I can see it adding would be sharing its IP address info.  Are there any features I am missing out on by not installing it?

In fact, since both the RPM and Tar file instructions end with "Start X Windows", it seems like it's not meant for anything but the GUI (for mouse tracking/screen setting enhancements)?

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JarryG
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With VMware tools you can do some things easier. For example, you can do "clean shutdown" of VM from ESXi, or synchronise time between ESXi and VM. I'm not sure but I think vmware balooning driver needs tools to work properly.

But you can still live without vmware-tools and do all the above mentioned tasks (althought not so easily). I personaly do not use vmware-tools with linux-vms because modular kernel is not allowed in our company.

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! :winking_face:

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JarryG
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With VMware tools you can do some things easier. For example, you can do "clean shutdown" of VM from ESXi, or synchronise time between ESXi and VM. I'm not sure but I think vmware balooning driver needs tools to work properly.

But you can still live without vmware-tools and do all the above mentioned tasks (althought not so easily). I personaly do not use vmware-tools with linux-vms because modular kernel is not allowed in our company.

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! :winking_face:
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bassresponse
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Right, I forgot about the time sync capability and the one click shutdown (without having to enter the guest OS).  I just wanted to make sure there was no performance-related stuff it added or anything to do with resource schedule, seems like not!  I think I will live without it also.

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AustinArnold
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I thought the drivers it installed were optimised for the virtual hardware as well, so in theory you might see a performance improvement in you use VMTools

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JarryG
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When talking about linux-VM, vmware-tools install some kernel-drivers for DRI (rendering and screen resolution handling), mouse-cursor grab/release driver and audio driver. Not much more (well, a few more services/daemons/processes, i.e. vmtoolsd for linux-VM).

VMware network-driver (vmxnet1/3) and memory baloon driver is already part of stable linux-kernel tree, as well as bus-logic scsi/sas/para drivers. I do not see where you could (even theoretically) win some performance using vmtools. Full content of VMware tools you can find here:

VMware Tools Device Drivers

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! :winking_face:
dariusd
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One other thing that Tools looks after for headless Linux guests: Some Linux distributions need a little extra configuration to support PCI hotplug, so, when installed on those distros, VMware Tools will do a modprobe acpiphp to make our PCI hotplug feature work as seamlessly as possible.  Of course, you can use whatever distro-specific mechanism to ensure that the acpiphp kernel module is loaded at boot and you'll get the same effect, and you can ignore this if you aren't planning to hot-add or hot-remove PCI devices to/from your headless Linux VMs.

--

Darius

bassresponse
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While I don't need the PCI hotplug, that is very useful to know!

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bassresponse
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JarryG, that's a useful link.  I'd actually read 70% of the docs but missed that section!

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