VMware Tools Installation

[Gilgamoth]

I currently use m0n0wall in various small deployments to act as a lightweight router between VM environments, however a personal niggle is the lack of VMware tools support. Is there a way to install VMware Tools within t1n1wall?

Cheers in advance

[andywhite]

vmware tools requires perl to install, we don't have perl in t1n1wall ... , also there is probably license issues with redistributing it

what features from vmware tools are you interested in ?  I'm guessing heartbeat, vmx nic and maybe memory driver ?

freebsd 10 has a vmx driver I can build into the kernel, I'm not sure the memory driver will really do anything interesting for t1n1wall

[Lee Sharp]

The is a vmx3 nic driver that works in m0n0wall and smallwall.  But again, it is the closed source, so releasing it is a bit of a challenge.  I have been working on a version using the open-vm-tools in my free time.  (In other words, it is slow.)

Some notes and links in no particular order...



http://www.freshports.org/emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11/


http://www.vmug.nl/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=336



To add the VMXNet driver to the monowall image you need a virtual FreeBSD installation (i used 5.4, default user-install). Follow these steps:

- add the monowall harddisk image to the FreeBSD VM and start it

- mount the cdrom (mount -t cd9660 /dev/acd0 /mnt/cdrom) and unpack the vmware-tools.tar.gz

- copy the FreeBSD4.9 vmxnet.ko from the modules/lib32 directory to /tmp

- mount the monowall harddisk (mount /dev/da0c /mnt/mono)

- add the vmxnet.ko driver to the /boot directory of the mounted disk

- edit the boot/loader.rc directory and add the following line below the loading of the mfsroot.gz!

'load vmxnet.ko'

- umount /mnt/mono

- shutdown the FreeBSD machine and boot the new harddisk image into a Monowall VM

- don't forget to set the networkcards to VMXNET in the vmx file of the Monowall VM (ethernet0.virtualDev="vmxnet")


(and ofcourse if you already have a configured firewall, you can backup the config, do the vmxnet thing, find/replace 'lnc' with 'vxn' and restore it)



Additional changes to the root filesystem can be made as follows:

- copy the mfsroot.gz to /tmp and gunzip it

- make a filebase memorydisk (mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /tmp/mfsroot -u 0)

- mount the memdisk (mount -t ufs /dev/md0 /mnt/mfs)

- make you changes (i.e. default configfile, additional scripts / php files)

- umount the memdisk (umount /mnt/mfs)

- remove the memdisk (mdconfig -d -u 0)

- gzip the mfsroot

- copy the mfsroot.gz file back to the mounted monowall harddisk


https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=34043.0
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/vmxnet3-ko-for-freenas-9-x-in-esxi-5-5.18280/
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/vmwhttps://forums.freebsd.org/threads/vmware-tools-and-freebsd-8-0.8707/are-tools-and-freebsd-8-0.8707/

[andywhite]

I have added the vmx driver into the 1.10 snapshots, (and the hyper-v and kvm drivers), so you can try generic-pc-1.10.2b51.iso and see if the vmx driver does anything for you

lee, you might be able to backport the vmx driver from freebsd 10, but I'm not going to try, I'm going forward with 1.10 as my main effort now (freebsd 10.2 based). Once I get the ipfilter issues resolved I don't think there is much point maintaining 8.x and 10.x versions.

[Lee Sharp]

Not a bad plan.  Besides, any fixes I get for 1.8 you can port over to t1n1wall...  I am looking at upgrading some of the older packages we still use.   I will look at your patches, and see about backporting them.  I have been working on hyper-v, but the 8.x series drivers have some...  Issues...

[Gilgamoth]

Hi guys,
apologies for not getting back to you sooner. It's around the ability to report back to vCenter, such as powering down the VM and such like without having to enter the console, and returning the IP addresses to the GUI.

As I said, no real functionality issues, more cosmetic.

[andywhite]

Have you a link to a doc on that feature, I might be able to something without perl

[Gilgamoth]

Apparently those features are part of OpenVMTools, which VMware now support
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2073803

This package contains the core open-vm-tools user-space programs and libraries, including vmtoolsd. These features are enabled by this package:

• Synchronization of the guest OS clock with the virtualization platform
• Enables the virtual infrastructure to perform graceful power operations (shut down) and file system quiescing of the virtual machine
• Provides a heartbeat from guest to the virtualization infrastructure to support vSphere High Availability (HA)
• Publishes information about the guest OS to the virtualization platform, including resource utilization and networking information
• Provides a secure and authenticated mechanism to perform various operations within the guest OS from the virtualization infrastructure
• Accepts additional plug-ins that can extend or customize open-vm-tools functionality

[andywhite]

the bad news is, it doesn't compile on freebsd , the good news is , a simple patch and it now compiles

however, vmtoolsd might be small, but it uses a lot of libraries, so I need to calc how much bigger this makes t1n1wall...

I'll take a look at the weekend, but I don't think i'll look at the kernel modules, as I don't see a need for vgauth or vmxnet (thats already in 1.10 from freebsd source)

[Gilgamoth]

Cheers Andy

[andywhite]

adding these tools takes the image size to 50MB , due to all the libraries it uses, one of the libraries alone is 25MB - libicudata.so .  Even compiling with the option to disable ICU, it still links the library ...

compiled with  --without-kernel-modules --without-gtk2 --without-gtkmm --without-ssl --without-xmlsecurity --without-xerces --without-icu --without-x --disable-vgauth


So, I'm not sure if we really want to take t1n1wall to a 50MB image

[Gilgamoth]

Is it possible to offer an image with and without the Tools installed? I'm sure I'm not the only one using it within a VMware environment?

Thanks for looking all the same.

[tuaris]

The emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11 port doesn't need perl, but still pulls in python:

Code: [Select]

[email protected]:~ # pkg info
fusefs-libs-2.9.9              FUSE allows filesystem implementation in userspace
gettext-runtime-0.19.8.1_2     GNU gettext runtime libraries and programs
glib-2.56.3_3,1                Some useful routines of C programming (current stable version)
indexinfo-0.3.1                Utility to regenerate the GNU info page index
libdnet-1.12_1                 Simple interface to low level networking routines
libffi-3.2.1_3                 Foreign Function Interface
libiconv-1.14_11               Character set conversion library
libmspack-0.9.1                Library for Microsoft compression formats
libxml2-2.9.8                  XML parser library for GNOME
open-vm-tools-nox11-10.3.0_1,2 Open VMware tools for FreeBSD VMware guests
pcre-8.43                      Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library
pkg-1.10.5_5                   Package manager
python27-2.7.16                Interpreted object-oriented programming language
readline-7.0.5                 Library for editing command lines as they are typed