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.
First, you need to create what is called a macOS Catalina VMware image which in essence is the same type of file macOS users would use to install the Operating System initially. In addition to this, you’ll also need to download VMWare Player itself as an additional Patch Tools file. Patch binaries and vmware-vmx processes to boot macOS. Patch the vmwarebase files (.dll or.so) to be able to choose “Apple” when creating a new virtual machine. Download the latest versions of VMware Tools for macOS. We can find several patches that allow us to do this. All of them safe, reliable and published on GitHub.
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!
After installing Mac OS X Mojave on a virtual machine, straight away you will notice that you are not able to get a full resolution for Mac OS inside the virtual machine. Even though you toggle the VM to full screen.
One will also notice a drastic lag in the performance of the overall Mac OS inside the virtual machine.
Though the reasons for this lag, and a bit slower system can be a low configuration system on itself. But despite having a high-end configuration, if you are facing these kinds of issues you can look into the below-mentioned measures to actually solve them.
Some of the issues solved by this fix:
- You can use MAC OS X Mojave in full resolution in VMware / virtual machine.
- Display lags are fixed.
- Overall faster-performing system
How To Speed Up Mac OS X Mojave In Vmware/Virtualbox
First : Beamoff
2020 Update: Unfortunately, Beamoff does not seem to work on mac os mojave. But the new edition of VMware tools seem to solve this issue for most of the users.
Beamoff is a free script developed by the Hackintosh community and experts that fix internal issues with the system. This eventually results in a much smoother performing system and application on MAC OS.
- Extract it to the Mac OS’s home screen.
- Go to system preferences > Security & Privacy > Allow apps downloaded from :
- You should not be able to alter the selections yet.
- Click on the yellow lock on the bottom left of the screen, and then enter your password.
- Alter the settings to “Anywhere”.
- Click on the lock again to lock it.
- You should see the much-improved performance of the system.
Second : Vmware Tools
Remember the unlocker we used while installing Mac OS X on our virtual machine, we will need that unlocker again.
The link to download the unlocker : https://bit.ly/2Xk9REr
- Shutdown your virtual machine.
- Edit virtual machine settings and open up CD/DVD(SATA).
- Under “Connection” select “Use ISO image file.
- Click on “Browse” and navigate to the “UNLOCKER FOLDER/tools/ Darwin.iso
- Select the Darwin.iso file.
- Now power on the virtual machine.
- You should straight away see the installation screen for VMware tools.
- Double click on “Install VMware Tools” and click on “Continue”
- Install > Continue Installation and enter your login password
- Once the installation has completed, click on the restart to restart the system
- You might be prompted to open the security preferences to allow the VMware tools, do that
- Now your system will be less laggy and the Mojave will run on fullscreen
- To confirm the tools are installed, click on the “apple” icon on the top left corner of the screen and ” About this mac”
- You should see that the graphics is 128 MB and not just 3 MB
It’s plain and simple to get the tools installed. After you’ve installed the tools, just make sure you restart your system.
So that’s how you can optimize mac os Mojave ‘s performance in vmware workstation player and run mac os in full screen mode.
Vmware Tools For Mac Os X Catalina
Noticed any differences with your system yet?? Let us know!!!