VMWare Tools for FreeBSD

[Uwe Laverenz]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 05:52:27PM +1100, Terry Sposato wrote:

> Is there any future development work being undertaken in order to port
> vmware-tools to FreeBSD.

I don't know if somebody is actually preparing an official port of
http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/ but I don't think it's too
difficult to compile and run them on FreeBSD 7.0. I hope I'll find
the time to test this soon but I wouldn't be able to roll a port without
some help. :)

> As our organisation using VMWare ESX Server and a lot of our servers are
> being virtualised to save hardware costs, this would let our FreeBSD servers
> follow as well.

If you're using FreeBSD 6.x, you can use the vmware-tools that come with
VMware server 1.04. I tested them with 6.2/amd64 and 6.3/amd64 and they
work fine (vmmemctl.ko and vmware-guestd), including VMotion.

> It does work find under Linux so I am 50% confident that it would port to
> FreeBSD if the work was done. Is it a licensing issue or another reason? Not

No, it's not a licensing issue, since vmware-tools are released as open
source now. I guess it's simply lack of interest and that there aren't
many ESX users who are using FreeBSD as a platform. FreeBSD is not an
"enterprise" system, you know... :-/

Uwe