Installing VMware tools on a Linux guest

Posted on 19.Jan 2010 by Ray Heffer in Linux, Scripts & Commands, Virtualisation, VMware

Start the VMware Tools installation

Using the VMware VI Client, right click on the Linux guest and select Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.

Mounting the CD-ROM

You’ll need to mount the CD-ROM on the Linux guest.
# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt

Change the working directory to /mnt
# cd /mnt
Using the RPM installer, install VMware tools.
# rpm -Uhv VMwareTools-3.5.0-153875.i386.rpm
Unmount the CD-ROM
# umount /dev/cdrom
Starting VMware tools and make sure it starts on boot.
# service vmware-tools start
# chkconfig vmware-tools on
Run the Vmware tools configuration tool. * This will shutdown the ethernet interface, so do this from the console.

# vmware-config-tools.pl

That’s it!

Troubleshooting:

“Trying to find a suitable vmmemctl module for your running kernel.”

“None of the pre-built vmmemctl modules for VMware Tools is suitable for your running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmemctl module for your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)?”

If you are using CentOS 5 like me, then you’ll need to install GCC and kernel-devel otherwise it will fail. Also, make sure your kernel version matches the kernel-devel version. This error will also present itself if your are running Xen virtualisation.

# yum install gcc kernel-devel
# yum upgrade kernel kernel-devel

Finally, reboot to load the updated kernel and try again.

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