open-vm-tools worthwhile?

chavez243ca

chavez243ca

I run several BSD instances on ESXi 3.5 and until recently all without vmware-tools. They are all non-Xorg servers, but I was taking a look at open-vm-tools and decided to build the port on a test instance to see if makes any difference.

Has anyone any insight as to the usefulness of vmware-tools in a non-GUI BSD environment? Better memory performance, I/O, network?

TIA
 
On all of my FreeBSD systems hosted in a VMWare system (Workstation, ESX/ESXi, etc), I install emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11. The most important thing is time sync from host system to guest after running vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync enabled after install.

Other than that, you get other useful features such as graceful operating system shutdown and suspend from the VI client. You can also load the vmx net driver from the loader to use the paravirtualized network interface card if your ambitious, although I haven't seen any performance difference compared to the emulated em(4) ethernet interface.
 
don't forget if you have ESX cluster and vm-move you can move the vm only between ESX hosts if the tools are installed.
 
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