How to install VMware tools on Linux

Installing VMware Tools from the Command Line with the Tar Installer

The first steps are performed on the ESX host, within the VMWARE infrastructure client menus:

1. Power on the virtual machine.

2. After the guest operating system has started, prepare your virtual machine to install VMware Tools.

Right click VM, Guest --> Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.

Take the linux console using putty:

3.  Mount the contents of CD using the below commands:
     
     mkdir /mnt/cdrom    --> To create a new directory to mount contents

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom  --> Mounts content from CD to the new folder

Change the working directory

cd /tmp

Note: If you have a previous installation, delete the previous vmware-distrib directory before installing. Use the below command for this operation:


rm –fdr /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib

4. Untar the VMware Tools tar file:

tar zxf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools<xxxx>.tar.gz

Where <xxxx> is the build/revision number of the VMware release.

Unmount the CD drive

umount /dev/cdrom

5. Run the VMware Tools installer:

cd vmware-tools-distrib

./vmware-install.pl

You may experience the below issue if perl is not installed :

"/use/bin/perl : bad interpreter: No such file or directory"

If you receive the above error, run yum install perl to install perl.

Respond to the configuration questions on the screen. Press Enter to accept the default values for everything.

6. Reboot the machine (ignore any VFS messages, you can still enter the command):

init 6