I recently had a need to deploy a virtual machine (VM) instance of Kali Linux on VMware ESXi. Once the install was complete I opened the virtual machine console and dragged it out to be larger then told the console to scale the Kali instance to fill it. Unfortunately it didn’t work and for a moment I was scratching my head. Before anyone says it, the guest tools were already installed and running as expected.
After a moment I remembered to check the virtual machine graphics options and that was when I found the culprit.
Here we have the standard VMware VM console – it’s not that big a screen to work with when you need to use it so it’s handy to be able to stretch it out and then tell the VM to fill the window.
Hmm when I go to the ‘View’ menu option I am not given the choice, it’s greyed out.
OK not a problem let’s edit the virtual machine settings, specifically the virtual video card hardware settings. I’ve highlighted the option we are interested in – ‘Enable 3D support’. It is disabled and this is what we need to amend.
Let’s enable this option and then try our console resizing again.
OK now that we’ve sorted the settings let’s power on the virtual machine and see whether the ‘fit guest’ option is available to us.
Huzzah! We have success…
It’s rare that I use Kali as a VM on ESXi – on Workstation, yes all the time but rarely do I leave a copy running on one of my clusters. The main reason is rather trivial and selfish – I have a static IP address at home for my VPN as it just makes my life easier. I wanted to test some changes I’d made, as well as some of my firewall rules so it was simple to kick some tests off on my Kali VM at work as I knew what the source IP would be so filtering my firewall logs to check would be easy.