Installing VMware Native Tools:

1. Choose to install the vmware tools from within the Vmware vSphere client user interface (right-click on the virtual machine and then select Guest > Install/Upgrade VMware tools).  This will make the VMware tools installer CD available to the virtual machine as a CD-ROM that contains the necessary installation files.

2. The VMware-tools installer script will restart the network interfaces. This will stop the script when run over a network connection.  It is therefore necessary to start the script either via the physical server console, the ESX console, or inside a "screen" session to let it continue running during network restart.  Please contact support for assistance.

3. Create a folder to mount the CD-ROMs contents to:

mkdir /mnt/cdrom

4. Mount the CD-ROM to the new directory created “/mnt/cdrom”:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

5. This will allow you to display the contents of the virtual CD-ROM (ISO) for VMware Tools:

ls /mnt/cdrom

For this example “VMwareTools-8.4.6-385536.tar.gz” is displayed it may be newer than that based on the release of VMware you are using.

6. Create a directory to copy the contents of the VMware tools to:

mkdir /temp-vmware-tools

7. Navigate to directory: cd /temp-vmware-tools

8. Extract the contents of the tar.gz file:

tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz

9. This should extract all the contents of the CD-ROM needed to install VMware tools into a directory ‘vmware-tools-distrib’.

10. Navigate to the vmware-tools-distrib folder:

cd /temp-vmware-tools/vmware-tools-distrib

11. Display the contents of the folder to show the VMwareTools…tar.gz file that you will use to install:

ls -al

12. Notice a file called vmware-install-pl in the directory which can now be used to perform the installation procedure.

Do NOT run this file directly when connected over the SSH protocol ! Use the command "screen" to allow the script to finish even if the network gets restarted.

./vmware-install.pl

13. Answer all the default prompts by hitting the enter key on each prompt.

14. Once installation completes, it may ask you to go through configuration of VMware Tools. Press enter on each item to accept the defaults.

15. Reboot the machine once all questions are answered with the default settings.

16. Upon reboot, ensure all the VMware services start properly with the [OK] Status.

17. Ensure the NIC information displays properly with proper duplex:

ethtool eth0

Should list Supported ports, Supported link modes, Supports auto-negotiation, Advertised link modes, Advertised auto-negotiation, Speed, Duplex, Port, PHYAD, Transceiver, Auto-negotiation and Link Detected.

Note: If the tools are not properly installed, then ethtool eth0 will only list “Link Detected”. If this is the case, reboot the server to see if this corrects the issue. If not, then it may be necessary to uninstall the tools and then re-install. Please go to next section to uninstall VMware Tools.

18. Confirm the VMware guestd service is running, use the commands:

ps aux |grep vmware

ps aux | grep vmtoolsd

You should see EITHER /usr/sbin/vmwareguestd or /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd running, depending on your version of ESX.  If you see either of these, then VMware tools is running.

19. Ensure VMware tools are loaded into run level 3: chkconfig --list | grep vmware

Should display: vmware-tools 0:off 2:on 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

Uninstalling VMware Native Tools:

1. To uninstall VMware tools, run the following:

/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

This proceed to stop the VMware Tools services and remove the VMware Tools. A message similar to this should appear “The removal of VMware Tools 8.4.6 build-385536 for Linux completed successfully…”

Please reboot the Symantec Encryption Management Server (formerly PGP Universal Server) once this message appears.>

 tools, run the following:

/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

This should proceed to stop the VMware Tools services and remove the VMware Tools. A message similar to this should appear “The removal of VMware Tools 8.4.6 build-385536 for Linux completed successfully…”

Please reboot the Symantec Encryption Management Server (formerly PGP Universal Server) once this message appears