I recently deployed the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) virtual appliance to an ESXi 5.1 host. While it worked fine, the VMware Tools Version Status displayed ‘3rd-party/independent’ instead of Current. While this is normal, I was on a kick to get all my VMware Tools Current. If you share the same obsessive compulsive traits, here are some instructions for you:
Start by removing the existing Open VMware Tools:
rpm -e vmware-open-vm-tools-common vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod
We also need to install the C Compiler before we can install the standard VMware Tools. We can do that with zypper in SUSE Linux.
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.