VMware - Installing VMware Tools on Linux

Installing VMware Tools on Linux

There are two different sets of VMware Tools available for Linux, the standard VMware tools ISO package that comes with VMware and the Open-VM-Tools package available within package manager repositories for distros like Ubuntu or RedHat. From what I've read, both appear to work well and I have not observed any difference between the two when running them in a production environment.

Installing VMware-Tools:

If you're using VMware Tools included with vCenter then you must first mount the ISO in order to access the "cd" from the guest Linux operating system. To do so first edit the configuration of the VM and select the CD/DVD Drive:

Once you have selected to "Connect to CD/DVD image on a datastore..." you can browse to the native datastore on the vSphere server and select the vmimages -> tools-isoimages folder and then the linux.iso file.

Once the ISO file is connected you can proceed to the console of the Linux server and enter the following commands to install VMware Tools.

• sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
• sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom OR sudo mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom
• cd /mnt/cdrom
• tar xzvf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxx.tar.gz -C /tmp/
• cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/
• sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d

Installing Open-VM-Tools:

In order to install using a package manager such as aptitude, you will actually load the open-vm-tools rather than the standard VMware tools. Obviously the above process will work in any flavor of Linux but it's fully manual compared to using a tool like apt-get or yum to install or update the packages. The following commands are necessary to complete the open-vm-tools installation.

In Ubuntu Server:

• sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools

In RedHat Server:

• sudo yum install open-vm-tools

In either case, vCenter will show that VMware Tools is installed and display the version number regardless of which package you install, VMware Tools or Open-VM-Tools.