How to Install VMware Tools on Smoothwall Express 3.1

This tutorial shows you how to install VMware Tools on Smoothwall Express 3.1 step by step. It's very important that you install VMware Tools in the guest operating system. You can find download link at the end of this article.

VMware Tools significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of your guest machine. It also adds capabilities. VMWare strongly recommends that you install VMware Tools in all of your virtual machines and I agree with this recommendation.

What is Smoothwall Express?

Smoothwall Express is based on the Linux operating system and designed to defend your users and your network from external attacks. It's a Free Firewall that includes its own security-hardened GNU/Linux operating system and an easy-to-use web interface. It does not require knowledge of Linux to install or use.

What is VMware Tools?

VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine. VMware Tools Services handle communication between the guest and host operating systems. VMware Device Drivers replace many of the guest operating system drivers for physical hardware to ensure network connectivity and prevent drive compatibility issues. A memory control driver provides increased efficiency in memory allocation. Guest OS can be nicely shutdown or reboot without even logging onto the VM.

VMware Tools for Smoothwall Express 3.1 Features

• VMware Paravirtual SCSI Controllers (vmw_pvscsi ): High performance storage controllers that can result in greater throughput and lower CPU use. These controllers are best suited for high performance storage environments.
• Memory Balloon Driver (vmmemctl): It collaborates with the server to reclaim pages that are considered least valuable by the guest operating system.
• VMXNET3 (vmxnet3): Virtual network adapter designed to deliver high performance in virtual machines (VMs) running on the VMware vSphere platform.
• Kernel Module for vmhgfs: This is kernel file system module. You can use shared folders to share files among virtual machines and between virtual machines and the host system. The directories that you add as shared folders can be on the host system, or they can be network directories that are accessible from the host computer.
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Provides fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host. 

Installation Steps:

1. Download the Installer to Smoothwall Express 3.1.
2. Run the installer
• sh VMwareTools-8.4.2-SmootwallExpress-3.1-i386.run

VMware Tools Installation on Smoothwall Express 3.1

Really simple.

Sample Output for VMware Tools on Smootwall Express 3.1 SP2

Download: VMware Tools for Smoothwall Express 3.1
File Name: VMwareTools-8.4.2-SmootwallExpress-3.1-i386.run
Sha1Sum: F039369955C536247C62E9F2420355A93B9BD199

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