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Overview
One of the advantages of installing VMware tools is faster graphics performance, shared folder access and
drag and drop operations.
Few other advantages are synchronization of time with guest OS on the host system time. Automatic grab
and release of mouse cursor, copy and paste between guest and host system (requires fuse package) and
also better mouse performance.
Applies To
Linux flavour of operating systems.
Pre-requisites
Before you start Installing VMWare Tools on the system, below packages have to be installed.
Package Purpose
net-tools To find IP information
kernel-headers Kernel Headers
kernel-libs Kernel Libraries
kernel-devel Kernel development tools
make Make binaries of the compiled source
gcc Compile Source
perl Interpreter for VMWare Tools Installer
fuse Drag and Drop feature enabling for host and guest machine
Install Packages
yum install -y kernel-headers kernel-libs kernel-devel kernel-tools
yum install -y gcc
yum install -y make
yum install -y perl
yum install -y net-tools
yum install -y fuse
Invoke Install VMWare Tools – Host
To install VMWare tools, you can choose one of the methods, as per the below screenshot.
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Create CDROM Mount Location
After login into the guest machine, create the cdrom mount folder.
mkdir /media/cdrom
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Mount CDROM
Mount the cdrom to created mount location.
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom/
Copy – VMWare Tools Installer
Copy the installer to temporary folder.
cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.6.2-1688356.tar.gz /tmp/ or skip this step and directory
extract from “/tmp” folder.
Extract – VMWare Tools Installer
After copying, decompress the tar file
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.6.2-1688356.tar.gz
Invoke Installer
Invoke the installer and follow the instructions, press “Enter” to accept the default values.
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
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Note: Ideally, you could press “Enter”, though read the instructions and press enter for each question;
complete the installation and reboot the guest system.
VMWare Tools Installation – Verify
VMware tools daemon should be running upon completion and reboot of VMware tools installation
process.
To verify run the ps command filtering “vmtoolsd” and to check details by running “ps -uw PID” as shown
below
pgrep -l vmtoolsd
26882 vmtoolsd
ps -uw <pidof pgrep>
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 26882 0.1 0.4 186916 4488 ? S 00:47 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd
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Troubleshooting Installation
Issue – ipconfig
Error: Unable to find the “ipconfig” program.
From Centos 7 onwards, IP configuration will be retrieved by command “ip addr”, so we need to install
“net-tools” package. To net-tools package install run the command
yum install net-tools
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Issue – bad interpreter
Error: When you run the installer, “/usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory”.
To resolve the perl issue install run the command (install package)
yum install perl
Issue – Fuse Packages
Error: system does not have the required fuse packages installed
To resolve fuse issue, run the command (install package)
yum install fuse fuse-libs
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VMWare Tools Uninstallation
To uninstall VMWare tools, execute the command “vmware-uninstall-tools.pl”.
/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools
