VMware Tools is a critical component in your virtual infrastructure. It provides drivers for virtual and paravirtual devices, security components, and capabilities such as guest file system quiesced snapshots. On that note, I am delighted to announce the general availability of VMware Tools 11.0.
Option 2 - Similar to the above option, if you do not wish to use the vSphere API, you can simply copy the darwin.iso (VMware Tools) image onto your Mac OS X guests and then perform the automated install. This would be the most simplistic option and would apply to running Mac OS X guests on either vSphere/ESXi or Fusion. Download VMware vSphere. Run fewer servers and reduce capital and operating costs using VMware vSphere to build a cloud computing infrastructure. VMware products and provides links to in stallation instructions for each guest operating system. Note: If you are installing a guest operating system through VMware VirtualCenter, be sure it is supported under the VMware product — ESX Server or GSX Server — on which you are running the virtual machine. Guest Operating System Workstation VMware.
What’s New for Windows?
A major version bump usually signals significant new features, and this release is no exception. We continue our efforts to minimize additional reboot requirements by making the VMCI driver available through the Windows Update channel for Windows Server 2016 and above. My colleague Eric Gray blogged about the initial launch of this back in August 2018 when we made the pvscsi driver available through Windows Update. In April this year, we launched VMware Tools 10.3.10. At the time we made the vmxnet3 driver through this channel. We’re working hard to give you the option of further drivers, so expect to see more of this kind of announcements as time goes on.
VMware Tools 11.0 now uses Visual Studio 2017 as the kernel space compiler.
From a security perspective, we have split out the monolithic AppDefense driver into 2 separate drivers. We have split the AppDefense driver (glxgi.sys) into glxgi.sys and giappdef.sys. Glxgi.sys continues to provide guest integrity functionality, and the new giappdef.sys provides process and network attestation. This splitting of the drivers means we can replace the user-mode components without requiring a reboot, and that has to be a good thing!
There are 2 new features from the perspective of the Guest Admin. First, you can now configure VMware Tools to prevent automatic upgrades. You can also prevent a vSphere Admin from adding or removing VMware Tools components. If you have strict change control or security requirements, this one is for you!
VMware Tools 11.0 for Mac OSX
This release isn’t just about Windows, either. There are a couple of changes for Mac OS X users too. As of VMware Tools 11.0 for Mac OSX, we have deprecated the ballon driver for memory management. In readiness for MacOSX 10.15 (Catalina), this release of VMware Tools for Mac OSX is notarized.
So what about Linux?
It’s no secret that the TAR and OSP (Operating System Specific Packages) for Linux are no longer under active development. 10.3.5 was the final release of these tools from a feature perspective. However, we continue to backport security fixes for legacy Linux distros. To distinguish the fact that there are no new features for these VMware Tools, we are releasing VMware Tools 10.3.20, which is only available as TAR and OSP. If you’re running a modern distro, you should be using open-vm-tools rather than the OSP or TAR tools. Once the OS vendors have completed their build and test of the code, the latest version of open-vm-tools will be available in your repo. If you need to upgrade before your vendor pushes open-vm-tools to their repo, you can download the code from Github and compile for your platform.
Cross-Platform Improvements
So that’s the platform-specific aspects covered. On top of those, we also have some other general improvements for you. As of VMware Tools 11.0, we now capture the installation log into the hypervisor logs. In the case of issues, we collect these logs in the VMware support bundle for GSS to troubleshoot.
We also have some performance goodness for you too: you’ll see an increase in memory and guest process introspection performance. Finally, we see some pretty hefty performance increases for the Host-Guest Filesystem (HGFS). This is around 20% for high volume, low size data transfers, and a 30% performance increase when moving larger files. All in all, those are some pretty significant gains!
Summary
That’s a bunch of new features, performance bumps, and security fixes. If you’re itching to get your hands on the latest version, you can download from https://www.vmware.com/go/tools.
Read more about this release with the release notes of VMware Tools 11.0 . We also have separate release notes for the OSP/TAR only VMware Tools 10.3.20.
Also released today are VMware Workstation 15.5 and Fusion 11.5, which come bundled with the latest versions of VMware Tools.
Try our vSphere 6.7 Hands-On Lab here!
In this article, we’ll examine how to install VMware Tools on macOS High Sierra virtual machine on VMware vSphere server.
How to Install VMware Tools for macOS High Sierra
You need to setup VMware Tools for the macOS virtual machine that you have installed on vSphere. Under normal circumstances, you can set up VM Tools for virtual machine by following the path to Actions / Guest OS / Install Tools.
When you try to setup VMTools on a macOS virtual machine running on VM ESXi, the VM ISO image does not add to the VM. So, after shutting down the macOS VM and add the darwin.iso file to the VM, you can start installing it.
In the previous articles, we installed macOS on vSphere. In this article, we will install macOS VMware Tools on vSphere.
How to Setup VMware Tools for macOS High Sierra 10.13.4/5/6 on vSphere 6.7U2/6.5
To setup VMware Tools on VMware ESXi, follow the steps below in order.
Vmware Tools Iso Image
Step 1
Power off the macOS VM and click Edit to open the virtual machine’s settings. Then, click CD/DVD Drive 1/ Datastore to add the darwin.iso file to the VM.
Step 2
Click the Browse button.
Step 3
To copy the ISO image inside vSphere ESXi, click the Upload button.
Vmware Tools Iso File
Step 4
Select the Darwin.iso file you downloaded to your computer from the button at the bottom of the article and click the Open button.
Step 5
Select the Darwin.iso file on Datastore.
Step 6
Save the macOS High Sierra virtual machine settings by clicking on the Save button.
Step 7
Now, power on the virtual machine.
Step 8
As you can see in the image below, the ISO file is now integrated into the system. Double-click the darwin.iso file to start the setup.
In the setup window, click Install Tools.
Step 9
In the VMTools Installer window, click the Continue button.
Step 10
Start the setup of VM software for macOS by clicking the Install button without changing the location where the files will be copied.
Step 11
Click the Continue Installation button.
Step 12
Type your macOS Root password and click on the Install Software button.
Step 13
You need to configure the security setting to allow VM Tools setup when you encounter the System Extension Blocked warning. Click the Open Security Preferences button.
Step 14
To allow VM Tools for macOS, click Allow.
Step 15
After successfully installing VM Tools on ESXi, click the Restart button.
Step 16
When the VM restarts, you can now use full-screen mode.
Final Word
In this article, we have installed VM Tools for macOS 10.13.4/5/6 virtual machine on the ESXi server virtualization operating system. Thanks for following us!
Related Articles
♦ How to Setup vSphere ESXi
♦ How to Download vSphere Hypervisor ISO
♦ Download Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.4 ISO
♦ How to Setup Windows 10 on vSphere ESXi
♦ How to Setup Windows 7 on vSphere ESXi
Download Darwin.iso for macOS
You can download the darwin.iso file for Mac OS machine installed on VMware ESXi by clicking the following button…