Virtualization Guest Agents
April 6, 2020
memo
virtualization
This is just a quick memo to list plateform gest addtitions and the way to get them installed.
What are guest-additions?
Guest Additions are helper daemon running on virtualized guests, enabling extra features such as:
- information exchange between the host and the guest (eg. IP addresses, filesytem space)
- allow the host to execute some command in the guest (clean-non-ACPI shutdown, IO freeze for backup, request to swap to free host memory)
- improved hardware support, usually with better graphic/storage/network drivers for virtualized hardware
Packages (in apt and yum) for some hypervisor hosts and Linux guest
| Hypervisor | Guest package | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| VMware vSphere/ESXi | open-vm-tools |
https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools |
| Qemu (Proxmox and libvirt) | qemu-guest-agent |
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu-guest-agent |
| VirtualBOX | Install from VBoxGuestAdditions.iso |
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html |
| Qemu (Gnome BOX) | spice-vdagent (graphic driver) |
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html |
For Windows guests
| Hypervisor | Guest package | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| VMware vSphere/ESXi | VMware Tools | Introduction to VMware Tools on docs.vmware.com |
| Qemu (Proxmox and libvirt) | virtio-win and qemu-ga-x64.msi |
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu-guest-agent |
| VirtualBOX | Install from VBoxGuestAdditions.iso |
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html |
| Qemu (Gnome BOX) | spice-guest-tools (graphic driver) |
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html |