open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools. They are a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and user experience of virtual machines. As virtualization technology rapidly becomes mainstream, each virtualization solution provider implements their own set of tools and utilities to supplement the guest virtual machine. However, most of the implementations are proprietary and are tied to a specific virtualization platform.

With the Open Virtual Machine Tools project, we are hoping to solve this and other related problems. The tools are currently composed of kernel modules for Linux and user-space programs for all VMware supported Unix-like guest operating systems. They provide several useful functions like:

* File transfer between a host and guest
* Improved memory management and network performance under virtualization
* General mechanisms and protocols for communication between host and guests and from guest to guest