I have been working on a server consolidation project for one of my clients and we have found several Endian firewalls running EFC 2.1.2. Due to their low foot-print requirement and basic storage requirement (IMHO) these are ideal candidates for consolidation by virtualisation. Using VMware ESXi 3.5 as a platform I found there wasn’t a “quick-fix” for getting VMware tools (enhanced networking and time sync) enabled inside the guest – which would have been a major for stateful services and fail-over.

Below are how I managed to compile the VMware tools and disable NTP sync to get the guest humming… While the information I’m providing is based on EFC 2.1.2 it should work (give or take package names and gcc4 on 2.2 (RC’s)). In my guests I have set the following (in the VMX configuration file):

ethernetX.virtualDev = “e1000″

1. Install vmware-tools from the VMware Infrastucture Client
2. Install wget (and dependant info package) so you can get other packages
   • rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/info-4.7-5.i386.rpm  
   • rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.9.1-17.i386.rpm  
3. Find the download url via the following URL http://www.endian.com/en/community/download/updates-and-source/ the package your after will depend on your version of endian (in my case the following works):
   • wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/efw/EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS.tar.bz2
4. Extract the Endian developer packages
   • bunzip2 -cd EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS.tar.bz2 | tar xfsv -
5. Install the required packages
   • cd EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS
   • rpm -Uvh binutils-*.rpm cpp-*.rpm glibc-kernheaders-*.rpm kernel-devel-*.rpm patch-*.rpm make-*.rpm glibc-devel-*.rpm glibc-headers-*.rpm gcc-3*.rpm  
   • cd ..
6. Symlink the kernel headers to save us having to path to it during the install
   1. ln -s /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m` /usr/src/linux
7. Unpack the VMware tools
   • mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom
   • mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
   • gunzip -cd /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-3.5.0-123630.tar.gz | tar xfsv -
8. patch VMware tools for Endian (which can be downloaded from here)
   1. cat vmware-tools-distribution.patch | patch -p 0
9. build the tools
   1. export CC=/usr/bin/gcc
   2. cd vmware-tools-distrib
   3. ./vmware-install.pl
   4. cd bin
   5. sh startup-fix.sh
10. reboot

For those of us who want to make modifications to some of the VMX configuration options under a VMware guest but don’t want to restart will be happy when you find out what the vmware-guestd can do! For example:

vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″

This command under a Linux VMware host will set the VMX synctime option to true (if it was previously disabled). This means that you don’t need to shutdown and restart your VM – excelent for production VMs. There are loads of additional VMX settings some are read-only but some are read-write.

I can’t confirm but I presume you can set the respective options under a Windows host also.