VMware Tools and vCO Appliance

In a recent post I wrote about my obsessive compulsive desire to update all my VMware Tools. In many cases virtual appliances come with a ‘3rd-party/independent’ version of VMware Tools which are not ‘Current’ according to the vSphere Client. If you want to replace the VMware Tools version on a vCO Appliance, you can follow these steps:

Add a CD-ROM device to the virtual machine.

Remove the existing version of VMware Tools…I’m sure there is a more refined way of doing this, but as I couldn’t find an option to remove all of the dependancies, I just removed each package by name:

rpm -e vmware-tools-esx-nox vmware-tools-plugins-guestInfo vmware-tools-plugins-autoUpgrade vmware-tools-plugins-vix
rpm -e vmware-tools-plugins-timeSync vmware-tools-esx-kmods-default vmware-tools-plugins-powerOps vmware-tools-vmxnet-kmp-default
rpm -e vmware-tools-vmxnet-common vmware-tools-plugins-deployPkg vmware-tools-plugins-vmbackup vmware-tools-vsock-kmp-default vmware-tools-vmci-kmp-default
rpm -e vmware-tools-vmci-common vmware-tools-vmmemctl-kmp-default vmware-tools-vmmemctl-common vmware-tools-vsock-common vmware-tools-plugins-hgfsServer
rpm -e vmware-tools-services vmware-tools-core vmware-tools-libraries-nox vmware-tools-guestlib
rpm -e vmware-tools-foundation

We also need to install the C compiler like before. Unlike the vMA appliance, the vCO Appliance does not have a zypper repository listed. We can add one pretty easy:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/ 114

We can then install GCC with zypper:

zypper in gcc

If you haven’t used zypper already, you may need to select ‘t’ to temporarily trust the distribution key. You’ll then want to select Option 1 to resolve a conflict by removing the existing version of GCC and installing the new version.

From this point, we can install VMware Tools in normal Linux fashion. Select Guest > Install VMware Tools and then follow these steps:

mkdir /tmp/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /tmp/cdrom
cp /tmp/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.0.1-913578.tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp
tar zxvf VMwareTools-9.0.1-913578.tar.gz
./vmware-install.pl

The installer is going to ask a bunch of questions — selecting the defaults should work just fine. We are now running the current version of VMware Tools for this host.