Trickle

Tricke allows you to limit bandwith for processes that do not support bandwith limitation out-of-the-box. It works by preloading and simulating the socket API. You use it as a wrapper when starting the process, like trickle -d 80 someapp.

You can use it to limit rsync speed for instance (thanks to http://www.yak.net/fqa/404.html): rsync -auvPe “trickle -d 80 ssh” user@host:/src/ /dst/

VMWare Tools and Kernel 2.6.24

VMWare Tools out of the box do not install on kernel 2.6.24 (as used in Ubuntu 8.04 for instance). A possible solution is described here. It is based on using the open-source version of the VMWare tools (open-vm-tools).