Performance cookies are used to analyze the user experience to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. They allow us to know which pages are the most and least popular, see how visitors move around the site, optimize our website and make it easier to navigate. 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. Darwin.iso: VMware Tools image for OSX Follow the procedures listed in the following documents to download VMware Tools for platforms that are not bundled with ESXi: VMware Tools 11.0.1 Release Notes.

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• Vmware Tools Iso Windows
• Vmware Tools Darwin.iso 5.0.3 Download

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.

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.

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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.

Vmware Tools Iso Windows

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!

After publishing my recent article on automating the silent installation of VMware Tools for Linux guestOSes, I received a similar question regarding Mac OS X guests and whether the existing script would also apply. The answer is no since Mac OS X packages differ from the Linux installres, but it is possible to automate the installation of VMware Tools for Mac OS X guests.

After quickly looking into this, I realized there are actually several options that are available to customers and it would depend on how you would like to install VMware Tools and what platform you are running your Mac OS X guests on. I will share a couple of options which also includes existing solutions that have already been developed. At the end of the day, the choice will ultimately be up to the administrator on how he/she would like to proceed.

Option 1 - If you are a vSphere/ESXi customer running Mac OS X, you will probably want to mount the VMware Tools installer and then initiate an installation within the Guest. You can actually perform the entire operation within a single context by leveraging our vSphere API to issue the VMware Tools installer and then using the Guest Operations API to perform the installation.

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.

Option 3 - You can also download VMware Tools using VMware's online repository (thanks to Rich Trouton for sharing this tidbit) and then performing the installation which is very similar to Option 2. The only downside is if you are running Mac OS X on vSphere/ESXi, the status of VMware Tools will show 'unsupported' as the version will differ from version distributed with vSphere/ESXi. In fact, Rich Trouton has an existing solution that he has published here which you can read more about.

If you are already familiar with using the vSphere API and are using vSphere/ESXi, I personally would go with Option 1 just because you can stay within a single context from an automation standpoint and not have to jump between different interfaces. If you not comfortable, want a quick solution or running just Fusion, then Option 2 and 3 would be ideal. Below is an example Gist demonstrating a simple shell script which implements Option 2 and Option 3 with a slight twist from what Rich has done which does not require Git.

Here's an example of running the script using Option 2:

I am sure there are probably other methods out there, but the great news is that it is indeed possible to automate VMware Tools for Mac OS X guests 🙂

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