VMware Workstation and Fusion USES Open VM Tools instead of VMware Tools enhancement tools when installing Fedora 23 and 24 and other Linux systems

VMware Workstation/Fusion are the desktop virtualization software corresponding to Windows/Linux and macOS respectively. In the past, after installing the operating system virtual machine in VMware, it was necessary to install the VMware Tools enhancement tool in the virtual machine to realize the file sharing between the host and the virtual machine, the adaptive adjustment of virtual machine display resolution, the enhancement of virtual machine display capacity and the acceleration of 3D.

However, with the development of Linux system kernel and surrounding environment, now VMware no longer recommends the installation of VMware's official enhanced tools in Linux virtual machine, but recommends users to use Open VM Tools instead.

Open VM Tools VMware is enhanced to the original virtual machine tools (VMware Tools) after most of the open source formed by the community to continue to develop perfect Linux open source virtual machine environment enhancement kit, not only supports VMware virtualization architecture environment, can also support Parallels virtualization environment architecture (similar to VMware another 1 commercial desktop virtualization product), later can also support such as KVM/Xen virtualization architecture.

Open VM Tools can maintain the latest version support with the upgrade of Linux kernel, and completely solve the problem that the upgrade of VMware was too slow to keep up with the upgrade of Linux kernel and peripheral software, which led to the disappearance of virtual machine enhancement effect (sometimes users need to patch the source code of VMware Tools and recompile and install it by themselves, which is very tedious).

Here, VMware Fusion in macOS environment is taken as an example. After installing Fedora 24 Linux, Fedora has already installed Open VM Tools by default, which can be viewed through the following command:

$ rpm -qa | grep open-vm

If Open VM Tools has been installed, the following information will be returned:

open-vm-tools-desktop-10.0.5-4.fc24.x86_64
open-vm-tools-10.0.5-4.fc24.x86_64

If you find that Open VM Tools is not installed on your system, you can install it with the following command:

# dnf install open-vm*

After installing Open VM Tools, the virtual machine's display enhancement, 3D acceleration, adaptive resolution adjustment and so on are all available, but the file sharing function between the virtual machine and the host is not enabled by default, even if you configure and enable file sharing in the host. Open VM Tools actually supports VMware's own hgfs file sharing system, but you need to manually execute the relevant commands in the virtual machine and do a little configuration. Here is my train of thought in the boot from the startup scripts/etc/rc d/rc local add Shared file mount command, so as to realize automatically available after startup file sharing. Edit the bootstrap script using the following command:

# vi /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Add the following content:

#!/bin/bash
vmhgfs-fuse -o allow_other .host:/$(vmware-hgfsclient) /mnt/hgfs

Then make sure/etc/rc d/rc local have executable permissions:

# chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.local

After restarting the virtual system, you will find that the Shared folder has been automatically mounted to the /mnt/hgfs directory. Since Open VM Tools provides an vmware-hgfsclient command, you can automatically identify the VMware Shared folder name you set without having to specify it in the mount command (you can also specify it in the command, of course). Once mounted successfully, we use the mount command to view 1 of all the currently mounted file systems and related directories:

$ mount

You will find that the feedback result has the following line:

vmhgfs-fuse on /mnt/hgfs type fuse.vmhgfs-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other)

This shows that we can also mount the VMware Shared folder using the mount command, although the name of the Shared file system should be fuse.vmhgfs-fuse, which is not directly mentioned in the Open VM Tools documentation.