pfSense 2.2 was released - How to install VMware Tools (sort of)

Update 2016-05-04: If you are using pfSense 2.3 (or newer) then please do not follow this guide, or it will break your system! Use the pfSense Package Manager to install the open-vm-tools package instead!

I'm a big fan of pfSense, an Open Source firewall and router appliance, that I use in my hosted lab. Recently version 2.2 of pfSense was released with a lot of bugfixes and new features. Please review the announcement blog post to find out what's new.

In my lab I upgraded one of the "not so important" pfSense VMs to version 2.2 and then tried to get VMware Tools installed and running again following my own guide that I wrote a while back for pfSense 2.0 and 2.1. But, well, things have changed a lot with pfSense 2.2, because it is now based on the latest FreeBSD version 10.1. Here is what I found out and what I ended up with.

What's new in the V-Front Online Depot

Since I launched the V-Front Online Depot about a year ago it has developed into a place where you do not only find the ESXi software packages that I created on my own, but also quite a few applications and drivers that others have contributed.

In 2014 Raphaël Schitz (he runs the excellent french hypervisor.fr blog) e.g. created and contributed the Intel Infiniband Subnet Manager (ib-opensm) package and the iperf v2 tool for ESXi, but this time I want to highlight two community developed driver packages that will help people running ESXi on white boxes with unsupported NICs.