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.

Highlight: Zabbix	The main competitor of Nagios. Its monitoring platform is suited for any kind of IT infrastructure, services, applications, resources…
Nagios Core	Provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party add-ons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems.
Icinga 2	An open-source monitoring system which checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. It is scalable, extensible and can monitor large environments across multiple locations. It is also rather intuitive and adjusts to the changing conditions of your environment at run-time.
Grafana	Query, visualize, alert on, and understand your data no matter where it’s stored. With Grafana you can create, explore and share all of your data through beautiful and flexible dashboards.
VM Monitor	VM Monitor continuously monitors your VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V host and associated virtual machines in real-time.
SexiLog	SexiLog is a ready-to-go and free vmware appliances based on the ELK stack. Developed by the french community, it is a great syslog server that comes with tons of preconfigured VMware related filters.
Kiwi Syslog Server Free Edition	Collect, view and archive logs from up to five different routers, firewalls, machines or other devices that emit Syslog messages or SNMP traps.
LPAR2RRD	The tool offers you end-to-end views of IBM and VMware virtualization platforms and can save you significant money in operation monitoring as it is free.	²
PRTG Network Monitor	PRTG Network Monitor is a network monitoring tool aiming at eliminating server performance problems and bandwidth bottlenecks. Note that the free version is limited to 100 sensors.
Disk Space Monitor	This freeware tool will automatically monitor low disk space on multiple servers, keeping you abreast of which servers are getting close to low disk space conditions.
Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor	Real-time Bandwidth Monitor lets you set critical and warning thresholds to instantly see when usage is out of bounds.
Server Health Monitor	See into the hardware health of your server and get alerted before your applications are affected.
Service Monitor	Netwrix Service Monitor is a free tool used to monitor critical Windows services and optionally restart them after a failure.
STOR2RRD	SAN and storage performance and capacity monitoring.

Reporting

I always considered reporting like the little brother or sister of monitoring; one usually goes with the other. Here is a selection of free tools to help you improve your reporting game.

Highlight: RVTools	RVTools is a Windows .NET application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. It has been around for a long time and is used by every single vSphere administrator out there.
vCheck	A PowerShell HTML framework script designed to run as a scheduled task. Key information is emailed directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format. This PowerCLI script is built on a plugin’s framework and picks on the known and potential issues, making it easier to keep your environment in check with best practice.
Horizon Event Notifier	Monitoring Horizon environments isn’t always easy as the alerting mechanism isn’t as polished as vCenter’s. This tool connects to the Horizon View Event DBs and allows the user to customize which types of alerts to be notified on.
Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer	Free vmware tools distributed as flings include this Powershell script and module that uses PowerCLI to capture information about the Hosts and VMs running in your vSphere environment. It will report back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory.
HPE OneView for VMware vCenter	The Standard version of HPE OneView is free to HPE clients. HPE OneView for VMware vCenter is a plugin for the vSphere client which enables the administrator to quickly obtain context-aware information about HPE servers and HPE storage in their VMware vSphere environment directly from within vCenter.
Auditor for Windows File Servers	This free file server software tracks changes made to files, folders, shares and permissions. It also detects deleted or newly created files and folders as well as logs file server access attempts.
Auditor for VMware	Tracks configuration changes in a vSphere environment which include changes to datacenter instances, vCenter Server, ESXi, resource pools, clusters, folders, VMs and other objects.

Active Directory

Keeping track of what’s going on in an Active Directory isn’t always easy, especially when the organization doesn’t have a dedicated department. Check out these free tools to reduce the operational overhead in that area.

Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory	Unravel your tangled mess of permissions for Active Directory, network shares, folders, and files for users and groups with this free tool.
Account Lockout Examiner	A tool that notifies administrators about AD account lockouts and helps determine the root cause whenever an Active Directory account keeps locking out. Works also on mobile devices.
WhatsUp Active Directory Monitor	Keep track of all the user accounts and passwords in your organization and implement enterprise-wide policies, credentials and security. It allows you to limit the numbers of usernames and logins end-users need to remember and increases security.
Auditor for Active Directory	Provides visibility into what’s happening inside an AD domain by tracking logons and all changes to AD users, groups, organizational units, GPO links and various policies.
Effective Permissions Reporting	Helps you ensure that users’ permissions align with their roles in the organization. This freeware tool delivers a file share and Active Directory permissions report that details who has access to what and how that access was gained.

Stress testing

Testing and ensuring that your environment can accommodate the workloads is a key step of any sizing process. These free vmware tools will help you execute these stress tests.

VMware Vmmark 3.x	Another free vmware tool used to measure the performance, scalability, and power consumption of virtualization platforms.
VMware I/O Analyzer	An integrated framework designed to measure storage performance in a virtual environment and to help diagnose storage performance concerns that comes in the form of free vmware appliances.
Diskspd	DiskSpd is a highly customizable I/O load generator tool that can be used to run storage performance tests against files, partitions, or physical disks. It is a lightweight tool and can generate a wide variety of disk request patterns.
HeavyLoad	HeavyLoad is a stress testing utility designed to test computer performance under heavy loads.
HCIBench	Another one for the free vmware appliances in the flings, An automation wrapper around the popular and proven VDbench open source benchmark tool that makes it easier to automate testing across a HCI cluster. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results, and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes.

Networking

Whether you like it or not, you will have to get your hands in the network at some point. Because of this, it is always useful to have a few tools in your belt for when you need them.

Wireshark	A network protocol analyser that gives insight on what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level.
SoftEther VPN	SoftEther is an easy-to-use multi-protocol and widely compatible VPN software.
Nmap	Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source utility for network discovery and security auditing. It is also useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules…
IP SLA Monitor	SolarWinds IP SLA Monitor allows IT administrators to continuously monitor internet protocol (IP) service levels for IP applications and services.
IP Address Tracker	IP Address Tracker is a free, reduced feature set version of SolarWinds IP Address Manager enabling you to sample the functionality of IPAM.
Port Scanner	Scan available IP addresses and their corresponding TCP and UDP ports to identify network vulnerabilities.
Visual Traceroute	Displays the route a packet takes across a network and provides detailed response time information hop-by-hop from start to finish, continuously, over a specified duration or one-time.
WAN Latency Estimator	An estimate of WAN latency based on the light signal propagation time over a fibre link.

Platform

While it can be argued that the following fall under the free vmware tools category, you most likely will encounter or need some them at some point.

Highlight: VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0	The free edition of VMware’s enterprise hypervisor lets you use it as a standalone host. vSphere ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor.
VMware Workstation Player 16	VMware Workstation Player builds on the industry-leading foundation of Workstation Pro, and delivers a streamlined user interface for creating and running operating systems and applications in a virtual machine in which you can install vmware tools. VMware Workstation is a Type 2 hypervisor.
Kubernetes	The most popular and completely free container orchestration platform. VMware now offer their own implementation of Kubernetes with vSphere with Tanzu through paid licenses.
Docker	The most famous and free container runtime out there. Start getting used to using containers as they are not going anywhere any time soon.

Scripting

Scripting is part of the life of all good IT administrator (not only vSphere admins). In this category you will find a few tools to help you in that journey. Note that PowerShell ISE isn’t in it as it is embedded in Windows but it would certainly deserve a place here.

Highlight: PowerCLI	Probably the greatest free vmware tools, PowerCLI is a powerful suite of modules for PowerShell that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS, NSX, Horizon… and more.
Visual Studio Code	A free code editor that supports languages popular among the vSphere engineers such as Powershell, Python, json, html/css… A large array of extensions is also available for things such as Docker, Git, SSH, yaml…
Script List	A long list of handy PowerCLI scripts and one-liners for everyday use. If you are getting into scripting, try to write your own before looking at those. You will learn a lot faster that way.
Python	Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively. There are plenty of resources out there to learn this object-oriented language.

Storage

Building a full featured SAN or NAS doesn’t necessarily require the large investment that would be involved with the likes of VMware VSAN. Note that we didn’t include Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) as it is a Windows oriented product but it is included in the Windows Server license so we will mention it as an honorable mention.

Highlight: TrueNas Core	TrueNAS is the successor of FreeNAS. It is a SAN/NAS appliance that shares and protects data through virtually any sharing protocol. Note that the OS is based on FreeBSD so you can still install vmware tools with the open-vm-tools-nox11 package.
OpenFiler	Openfiler converts an industry standard x86_64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. It is easy to deploy as free vmware appliances.
CEPH	Ceph provides a unified storage service with object, block, and file interfaces from a single cluster built from commodity hardware components. Recommended for advanced use cases as it is not as straightforward as the 2 introduced above.
StarWind Virtual SAN Free	A free command-line based Software-Defined Storage stack that eliminates the need for physical shared storage by “mirroring” local disks and flash between its servers to create a fault-tolerant storage pool.
Gparted	GParted is a free partition manager that enables you to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss. It can prove useful in the category of free VMware tools when troubleshooting a host’s partition table for instance.
Brocade SAN Health Diagnostics	SAN Health Diagnostics Capture is a utility that securely audits and analyses your SAN environment.

Security

Many organizations invest in protecting the local network and infrastructure against threats coming from outside and other small businesses may rely on a simple firewall and basic Windows antivirus. The problem is that internal resources are often comprised from the inside through phishing attempts. However, you can already drastically improve the security of your environment with a few tools available for free.

Check out our blog on Ransomware impacting VMware ESXi.

Highlight: HornetSecurity 365 Threat Monitor	Detect and instantly delete email threats that breach your Office 365 security and enter your users’ inboxes. This is a great free tool to mitigate the risk of phishing attempts that can sometimes lead to ransomware.
VMware Security Configuration Guide	vSphere Security Configuration Guides (formerly known as Hardening guides) provide a list of security best practices on how to harden your vSphere environment.
Duo Free	With the recent ransomware threats on VMware ESXi, protect access to federated cloud and on-premises assets such as your vCenter servers with Duo’s easy-to-use two-factor authentication,
KeyCloak	KeyCloak is a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) provider. You can protect your vCenter from ransomware attacks by integrating it in your logon workflows.
KeePass	KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.
OpenSSL	OpenSSL is the famous toolkit for the TLS and SSL protocols. It is also a general-purpose cryptography library. A very usefull free tool when working with VMware certificates.
OPNsense	OPNsense is an open source, easy-to-use and easy-to-build HardenedBSD based firewall and routing platform. It is a fork of the famous Pfsense firewall appliance.

Online resources

In this section you will a few goodies that you may want to bookmark in your web browser as some of them will probably come in handy at some point.

Highlight: VMware Hands On Labs (HOL)	You can get access to free vmware tools to learn about the various products in the VMware portfolio through the hands-on labs interactive online platform,
VMware Marketplace	VMware Market place is a website where you can download free and paid content packs for all the VMware products that support them such as vRealize Orchestrator (free).
Virten sense codes	Troubleshooting storage performance can be tricky but SCSI sense codes present in the logs can help you pinpoint the issue. Use Virten’s tool to make “sense” of them.
VSAN Ready-Node sizer	vSAN Sizer provides a consistent methodology to help you design and size a vSAN backed SDDC.
Online IP Subnet Calculator	The IP Subnet Mask Calculator enables subnet network calculations using network class, IP address, subnet mask, subnet bits, mask bits, maximum required IP subnets and maximum required hosts per subnet.
Virtualization Calculator	Calculates the number of ESXi hosts in a vSphere cluster based on the planned VM workload and host configuration.
RAID Calculator	RAID calculator computes storage system characteristics based on the provided RAID level, number of disk drives, and drive capacity.
vSphere replication calculator	Provides you with real-time decisions trading off public cloud performance and cost.

So there it is! 101 Free VMware tools for you. Have we missed any tools you think deserve to be on the list? Let us know in the comments below.