Bug #10279
openpfSense's OpenVM Tools on ESXi 6.7 no longer provides guest vm functionality
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Description
When I run pfSense on ESXi6.7 (Update 3) with Open-VM-Tools installed from Package Manager, ESXi sees the Open VM tools installed, but no guest VM functionality works. This means basic functions like "shut down guest" do not work.
I'm not exactly sure when this stopped working, apparently my scripts and ESXi management tools have been simply powering off pfSense instead of gracefully shutting pfSense down.
It looks like the Open VM Tools package is quite old. The package version (as reported by package manager) is 10.1.0 (Nov 14, 2016) and its dependency is on open-vm-tools-nox11-10.2.5_1 (Mar 30, 2018) per GitHub. https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/releases
I would try one of the newer packages from Git, but they need to be compiled - it's probably not wise to set up a compiler on pfSense to test this theory. Is there, perhaps, a compiled version that's newer, based on what is available here: https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-ports/commits/devel/emulators/pfSense-pkg-Open-VM-Tools ?
In my environment, with official VMware tools, all guest VM functionality is working. pfSense is my only BSD11 VM.