VMware Tools is a set of services and components that enable several features in various VMware products for better management and seamless user interactions with guest operating systems.
VMware Tools Lifecycle Management provides a simplified and scalable approach for installation and upgrade of VMware Tools. It includes a number of feature enhancements, driver-related enhancements, and support for new guest operating systems.
Open VM Tools (open-vm-tools) is the open source implementation of VMware Tools for Linux guest operating systems. For the latest copy of the Open VM Tools source code, see GitHub.
For vSphere deployments, VMware provides operating system specific packages (OSPs) as a packaging and distribution mechanism for VMware Tools. For more information, see VMware Operating System Specific Packages.
Try Our Deployment and Planning Tools
The following resources are designed to help you plan your VMware tools deployment:
- vSphere Hardware and Guest Operating System Compatibility Guides. An online reference that shows what hardware, converged systems, operating systems, third-party applications, and VMware products are compatible with a specific version of a VMware software product.
- VMware Product Interoperability Matrices. Provides details about the compatibility of current and earlier versions of VMware Tools and other VMware products.
- Guest Operating System Installation Guide . This document includes instructions for installing supported guest operating systems on the following VMware products: VMware ESXi/ESX 3.5 and later, VMware Workstation 4.0 and later, VMware Fusion 1.0 and later, VMware ACE 1.0 and later.
Learn More About VMware Tools
To learn more about VMware Tools, see the following resources:
Use VMware Tools Documentation
The VMware Tools document in HTML reflect the latest VMware Tools update release of each major VMware Tools version. All our documentation comes in PDF format, which you can access by selecting the Download PDF icon 
on any page in the HTML documentation.
You can create custom documentation collections, containing only the content that meets your specific information needs, using MyLibrary.
