VMware Tools

From AstroArch

Contents 1 News 1.1 Previous News 1.2 Stand alone Tools 1.3 Merged Tools 2 Patches 3 Debian Fixes

News

Now for all versions of VMware products, the VMware Tools Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) for Linux exist. This replaces the Merged Tools below.

Previous News

3.5.0 Update 2 (103908) version of VMware Tools support kernel versions 2.6.24 or greater.

2.6.24 or greater kernels need NEW VMware Tools. The easiest method is to download the [http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/ Open Source VMware-Tools. Open VMware Tools provides two sets of tools. One for the Host of a hosted solution like Workstation or VMware Server. The other is for the VM itself. However for ESX, the merged tools work best I have found.

Stand alone Tools

RPM Based systems

yum -y install libdnet libdnet-devel libicu-devel icu

All systems

./configure --without-procps
make
make install

Use of the drivers is not 100% by hand. Hence why the merged tool option below is better.

Merged Tools

You can either use those tools, recommended, or use the following to merge the tools together. Note the open source tool are not ESX specific, but the drivers included work within ESX VMs just fine.

1. Install VMwareTools from VMware per normal
2. Download teh Open Source VMware Tools
3. Create a script with the following or issue the commands one at a time. Note for those who cut and paste there are 2 spaces before each line.

  tar -xzf open-vm-tools-*.gz
  cd open-vm-tools-*/modules/linux
  modsrc="/usr/lib/vmware-tools/modules/source"
  for x in `ls -d v*`
  do
     mv $x ${x}-only 
     tar -cf $x.tar ${x}-only
     mv ${x}-only $x
     mv $modsrc/$x.tar $modsrc/$x.tar.orig
     mv $x.tar $modsrc 
  done
  vmware-config-tools.pl

Download

ESX v3.5.0 build 64607 does not need any patches/changes for kernels < 2.6.24. However it does need a change for the vmum-ga tool in order for it to run. That change is:

   cd /usr/share/vmum-ga
   ln -s libexpat.so libexpat.so.0
   service vmum-ga start
   chkconfig vmum-ga on

It appears the installer left this out.

Patches

VMware Tool Patches

Debian Fixes

• VMXNET device to show up on boot you have to place the vmxnet driver into an initrd image.
• Debian VMware Tools Stopping Network Early causes NFS unmounts to hang.