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.
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after searching high and low, finally how to update vmware tools.
small notes to others who will find this page.
I needed to add a few more “rpm -e” and ./vmware-install.pl got stuck with “can’t find linux-kernel-header” which was solved with a simple ./vmware-install.pl –default
now instead of needing update it is unsupported ?!