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VMware Tools Installation

VMware provide tools which should be installed into any virtual machines running on VMware Cloud Director. The tools provide additional features such as automated customisation as well as improved performance by implementing optimised drivers such as storage, network and display.

Prerequisites¤

  • The VM must be powered on
  • Guest OS has been installed on the VM

Windows¤

  1. Browse to the virtual machine within the vApp.

  2. Identify the VM that requires VMware tools to be installed and click Actions > Power > On.

  3. Once powered on, click the Actions drop down and select Install VMware tools.

  4. Open the web console of the VM by clicking on Actions - VM Console - Launch Web Console If the grid view is enabled, click on the list bar and select VM Console > Launch Web Console

  5. Login to the operating system and follow the wizard to install the tools.

  6. Once the installation completed, eject the VMware Tools installer by right clicking the CD-ROM drive and select Eject

  7. Restart the guest OS to ensure all the necessary features are updated

Linux¤

There are two methods of installing the VMware tools for Linux, from within VMware Cloud Director using the method above or installing the open-vm-tools, which are now supported by VMware. Not all distributions provide support for the open-vm-tools however the following well known distributions do:

  • Centos 5/6/7
  • Red Hat 5/6/7
  • Ubuntu 12.04/14.04

Installing the VMware tools via VMware Cloud Director requires modules to be built against the running kernel. If the kernel is updated the administrator needs to run the VMware tools setup again to recompile the modules.

Red Hat/Centos 5/6/7¤

The open-vm-tools is available via the epel repository.

  1. Add epel repository.

    sudo yum install epel-release

    If the command above fails then you can run the following commands dependent on the version you are running:

    Red Hat/Centos 5

    wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-5*.rpm

    Red Hat/Centos 6

    wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-6*.rpm

    Red Hat/Centos 7

    wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-7*.rpm

  2. Install open-vm-tools

  3. Once the installation completed, unmount CD-ROM (if any attached)

  4. Restart the guest OS to ensure all the necessary features are updated

Ubuntu¤

  1. Install open-vm-tools

    sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools

  2. Once the installation completed, unmount CD-ROM (if any attached)

  3. Restart the guest OS to ensure all the necessary features are updated

Warning

It is recommended to unmount the VMware Tools Installer as soon as the installation completed. As failing to unmount VMware Tools installer, it will result failure in migrating the VM which is initiated by vSphere DRS to balance compute capacity on our backend Infrastructure.