Once the guest operating system has been installed the next step is to install a package called VMware Tools. This package adds drivers and additional software services to improve performance and allow for easier controls. These include being able to reboot the VM by sending a soft instruction to the operating system and a heartbeat service that will send alerts based on the VM’s state.
1. On the Summary Tab of the VM. The Web Client will alert that VMware Tools has yet to be installed, and offer a link to trigger the installation. This actually mounts DVD .ISO on the host to the VM.
2. In the subsequent pop-up window click the Mount button
3. If AutoPlay is enabled these should launch the installation. In the case of Windows 2012 R2, AutoPlay is not enabled by default – and you will need open the CD-ROM drive with file explorer to make it start.
4. Most virtualization administrators opt for a complete install. This can make the VM more portable between different virtualization platforms from VMware, it also means the VM is fully-featured for any scenario.
5. At the end of the install – the network should start because the VMXNET3 driver has been installed. You will also be required to reboot to ensure the drivers are all properly loaded. Subsequent upgrades of VMware Tools should not require a reboot. After a reboot the Summary tab should indicate the tools are running, and up to date – and should report information such as IP address and hostname.
Notice that the DVD .ISO used to install Windows 2012 R2 is still connected. It is good practise to disable the CD-ROM Device as this can decrease performance and cause warning and alerts in health check scripts and third-party tools. You can disconnect the device with the small icon next to it:
Installing VMware Tools (Linux)
Once the guest operating system has been installed the next step is to install a package called VMware Tools. This package adds drivers and additional software services to improve performance and allow for easier controls. These include being able to reboot the VM by sending a soft instruction to the operating system and a heartbeat service that will send alerts based on the VM’s state.
1. On the Summary Tab of the VM. The Web Client will alert that VMware Tools has yet to be installed, and offer a link to trigger the installation. This actually mounts DVD .ISO on the host to the VM.
2. In the subsequent pop-up window click the Mount button
3. In Linux this should mount the VMware Tools DVD ISO to a mounting mount – if not these command will allow the DVD .ISO to be accessible
mkdir /mnt/cdrom mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
4. The VMware Tools are stored in tar.gz and this can be copied to tempoary location and extracted
cp VMwareTools-N.N.0-NNNNNN.tar.gz /tmp cd /tmp tar -zvxf VMwareTools-N.N.0-NNNNNN.tar.gz
This extracts the VMware Tools .tar.gz file to the /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
5. Inside this directory is a Perl script called vmware-install.pl which will install the VMware Tools, and can be executed with ./vmware-install.pl. For the most part this utility asks for the default directories for the tools themselves.
6. Mid-way through the installation, /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl script will execute, which allows the administrator to control how the tools function. This allows the control of whether the “VMware Sync” driver is installed which is used by many backup vendors, and is responsibility for sync the file system with the file system cache
7. A full installation will attempt to enable the “Shared Folder” feature – this option is only available to desktop style virtualization such as VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion. This feature is not supported in VMware ESX and does not need to be enabled. The same is true of the vmBlock feature.
8. VMware Tools can be configured to allow the automatic building and installation of kernel modules at boot that are not present.
9. If a Linux graphical front end is discovered, the administrator will prompted with questions about resolutions in use
10. At this stage all the core services and drivers will be started
As with the install of VMware Tools, you may well need to reboot Linux to get full-fuctionality from VMware Tools. But after the install subsequent upgrades should be seamless and not require a reboot. Again, you can confirm the status of VMware Tools the Summary tab of the VM.
