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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

Contents
Overview ....................................................................................................................................................... 1
Applies To...................................................................................................................................................... 1
Pre-requisites ................................................................................................................................................ 1
Install Packages ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Invoke Install VMWare Tools Host ......................................................................................................... 1
Create CDROM Mount Location ............................................................................................................... 2
Mount CDROM .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Copy VMWare Tools Installer ................................................................................................................ 3
Extract VMWare Tools Installer ............................................................................................................. 3
Invoke Installer.......................................................................................................................................... 3
VMWare Tools Installation Verify .............................................................................................................. 5
Troubleshooting Installation ......................................................................................................................... 6
Issue finding ipconfig ................................................................................................................................ 6
Issue bad interpreter ................................................................................................................................ 7
Fuse Packages ........................................................................................................................................... 7
VMWare Tools Uninstallation ....................................................................................................................... 8

VMWare Tools Installation Guide


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
net-tools
kernel-headers
kernel-libs
kernel-devel
make
gcc
perl
fuse

Purpose
To find IP information
Kernel Headers
Kernel Libraries
Kernel development tools
Make binaries of the compiled source
Compile Source
Interpreter for VMWare Tools Installer
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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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

Create CDROM Mount Location


After login into the guest machine, create the cdrom mount folder.
mkdir /media/cdrom

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VMWare Tools Installation Guide


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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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

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
root

PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY


26882 0.1 0.4 186916 4488 ?

STAT START TIME COMMAND

S 00:47 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd

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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

Troubleshooting Installation
Issue finding 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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VMWare Tools Installation Guide


Issue bad interpreter
Error: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory.

To perl package install run the command


yum install perl

Fuse Packages
Error: system does not have the required fuse packages installed

To resolve fuse issue, run


yum install fuse fuse-libs

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VMWare Tools Installation Guide

VMWare Tools Uninstallation


To uninstall VMWare tools, execute the command vmware-uninstall-tools.pl.
/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools

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