101 Free VMware Tools

If you’re used to working with VMware products, you probably found yourself needing one or more tools to help you complete a specific task. Whether it’s a PowerCLI script to bolster your automation platform, a monitoring and analytical tool for renewed insight or perhaps SAN emulation software for shared storage datastores, surely, you will find something that suits your needs in the following list of 101 free VMware tools we put together.

You can download most of the tools and utilities straight away by clicking the product name or download link. In some cases, you’ll need to fill in a registration form and reply to an activation link before downloading.

This article will be periodically updated to ensure all links work and point to the latest versions. That said, it’s a long list so if you spot anything amiss, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update it immediately!

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The free VMware tools selected for this blog have been organized into different categories. Note that some tools are “highlighted”, meaning they are among the most popular and useful in the category.

Backup

It doesn’t come as a surprise that we will start this list of free VMware tools with the “Backup” category where you will find resources for a healthy backup environment.

Highlight: Altaro VM Backup	Altaro VM Backup is a fast, affordable, high-performance backup solution, specifically developed for small and mid-market businesses. We’ve cut the waste and hassle to give you an agile, streamlined solution that is easy to implement, feature-rich, with outstanding support as part of the package. It also comes as free VMware appliances to backup up to 2 VMs per host at no cost.
VMware vSphere Replication	VMware’s hypervisor-based, asynchronous replication solution for vSphere virtual machines. The software is bundled in free VMware appliances and handles the heavy lifting when copying VMs to the recovery site. It fully integrates with VMware vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client. Note that SRM, which is the DR orchestration solution is paid and sold separately.
The backup bible	You will find everything you need to know about planning, deploying and maintaining a secure and reliable backup and disaster recovery strategy in this free ebook.
Backup Calculator	Backup Capacity Calculator evaluates the required storage capacity for backups.

Management

In the “Management” category you will find free VMware tools to interact with your environment and manage it remotely in an efficient manner.

Highlight: vRealize Orchestrator	vRealize Orchestrator is an automation platform that comes in the form of a free VMware appliances. It lets you automate various infrastructure tasks using workflows that can be combined in many ways. Although often forgotten, it is one of the best free VMware tools. Learn how to get started with it.
Dell OME	The Dell OpenManage Enterprise console is a great tool to centralize and facilitate the lifecycle management of all your DellEMC equipments. You can update all your firmware to the latest versions quickly and automatically.
vSphere DatacenterCLI (DCLI)	DCLI (Data Center CLI) is a simplified command-line interface that you can use to automate tasks in your VMware Cloud on AWS, NSX-T, and vCenter Server environments.
VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)	In the free VMware appliances category, you will find a fling called VEBA. It offers Event driven automation based on vCenter events. Similar in a way to IFTTT (If This Then That) where you trigger an action based on an event.
Standalone esxcli	Esxcli belongs in the “Free vmware tools” category as it now offered as a standalone tool that can be run remotely and aims at replacing vcli which is deprecated. It certainly is a must have to troubleshoot ESXi issues or make configuration changes to your ESXi hosts.
vSphere Mobile client	If you’d like to install vmware tools on your mobile, this fling will allow you to get access to your vCenter servers through a dedicated app offered as a fling.
Remote esxtop (Resxtop)	If you know esxtop, you know resxtop. It is a command-line utility to run remotely on linux which provides a detailed look at how ESXi uses resources in real time. You can use the tool in one of the three modes – interactive (default), batch or replay.
VMware Horizon Toolbox	VMware Horizon Toolbox is a Web portal that acts as an extension to View Administrator in VMware Horizon 6 or above. A lot of extra metrics you don’t get in the Horizon console.
Windows Admin Center	Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based app for managing Windows servers, clusters, HCI as well as Windows 10 PCs. It is free and ready to use in production.
GLPI	GLPI is an ITSM software tool that encompasses inventory, ticketing, discovery and a plethora of features to help you plan and manage IT changes in an easy way. Very helpful to keep track of large vSphere environments.

Utilities

In here, we are laying down a selection of “utility” tools that serve various purposes which don’t really fit any category but are generally really useful to have in your admin toolbelt.

mRemoteNG	mremoteNG is an open source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager for Windows. A very nice free tool to centralize all your remote connections in one place.
Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan)	RDCMan manages multiple remote desktop connections. It is useful for managing servers where you need regular remote access to each machine. It was deprecated in version 2.7 due to security reasons but Microsoft brought it back with version 2.8. Make sure you don’t download a version older than 2.8.
VMware Remote Console	If you hate the vSphere web console, VMRC is your friend. It provides console access and client device connection to VMs on a remote host. Download and install before launching the external VMRC application directly from the vSphere web client.
FileZilla	FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
Putty	PuTTY is the most famous and free implementation of SSH and Telnet for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. Very handy to hop on all your infrastructure components with SSH.
WinSCP	WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality. Often used by vSphere administrators to connect to ESXi hosts.
Solarwinds TFTP Server	Use this free TFTP Server to upload and download executable images and configurations to routers and switches with ease. TFTP servers are also used by vSphere to boot on the network with pxe for stateless auto deploy for instance.
Notepad++	Do we still need to introduce it? Notepad++ is probably the most popular free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.
VMware OS Optimization Tool	A free VMware tools that helps optimize Windows systems for use with VMware Horizon View, also valuable outside of it. It includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems.
Windows Sysinternals	Microsoft backed utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. Although not really in the Free VMware Tools category, the Windows Sysinternals remain in most administrators’ toolbelts.
Horizon Helpdesk Utility	Although the feature was productized in the Horizon Console, this free VMware Tools allows your helpdesk agents to get faster access and execution for the helpdesk utility.
Rufus 2.16	Rufus is a utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB drives, memory sticks, etc. You can use it to create bootable ESXi drives when installing a bare-metal host.
Windirstat	Quickly get a visual representation of the storage used on your file systems and identify opportunities to make some room or find a noisy neighbor.
Official Visio stencils for VMware	A collection of Visio stencils to expand your library and make professional looking diagrams with VMware icons.
Technitium DNS Server	A lightweight portable DNS server that will come in handy in lab environments where need to deploy a VCSA with FQDN but you don’t have a suitable DNS server on the network.
Damn Small Linux	A great lightweight Linux distro, ideal for deploying in low-performance environments. Note that, because it is a stripped down and fairly obscure OS, it might be trick to install the vmware tools.

Converters

While vCenter Converter could easily fill this free vmware tools category in itself, there are other options and products that will help you manipulate VM objects.

Highlight: VMware vCenter Converter Standalone	Convert virtual and physical machines to VMware virtual machines between various sources (Workstation, vSphere ESXi…). You can also connect it to your vCenter Server environment and use it to configure existing virtual machines.
OVFTools	VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that allows you to import and export OVF packages to and from many VMware products. It also bypasses restrictions incurred by web browsers and VM sizes.
V2V Converter	This free tools from Starwind lets you convert and clone VMs from one format to another. The software supports the most widely used formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), StarWind native IMG and QCOW.

Monitoring

Everyone will hopefully agree that infrastructure monitoring is one of the most important aspects of the datacenter (if not the most). It turns out that many great free and open-source projects are available for this very purpose.