Install VMWare Tools CentOS 7

VMWare Tools Installation Guide – CentOS 7

Contents

Overview ....................................................................................................................................................... 1

Applies To ...................................................................................................................................................... 1

Pre-requisites ................................................................................................................................................ 1

Install Packages ......................................................................................................................................... 1

Invoke Install VMWare Tools – Host ......................................................................................................... 1

Create CDROM Mount Location ............................................................................................................... 2

Mount CDROM .......................................................................................................................................... 3

Copy – VMWare Tools Installer ................................................................................................................ 3

Extract – VMWare Tools Installer ............................................................................................................. 3

Invoke Installer .......................................................................................................................................... 3

VMWare Tools Installation – Verify .............................................................................................................. 5

Troubleshooting Installation ......................................................................................................................... 6

Issue finding ipconfig ................................................................................................................................ 6

Issue bad interpreter ................................................................................................................................ 7

Fuse Packages ........................................................................................................................................... 7

VMWare Tools Uninstallation ....................................................................................................................... 8


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Overview

One of the advantages of installing VMware tools is faster graphics performance, shared folder access and drag and drop operations.

Few other advantages are synchronization of time with guest OS on the host system time. Automatic grab and release of mouse cursor, copy and paste between guest and host system (requires fuse package) and also better mouse performance.

Applies To

Linux flavour of operating systems.

Pre-requisites

Before you start Installing VMWare Tools on the system, below packages have to be installed.

Package Purpose

net-tools To find IP information

kernel-headers Kernel Headers

kernel-libs Kernel Libraries

kernel-devel Kernel development tools

make Make binaries of the compiled source

gcc Compile Source

perl Interpreter for VMWare Tools Installer

fuse Drag and Drop feature enabling for host and guest machine

Install Packages

yum install -y kernel-headers kernel-libs kernel-devel kernel-tools

yum install -y gcc

yum install -y make

yum install -y perl

yum install -y net-tools

yum install -y fuse

Invoke Install VMWare Tools – Host

To install VMWare tools, you can choose one of the methods, as per the below screenshot.


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Create CDROM Mount Location

After login into the guest machine, create the cdrom mount folder.

mkdir /media/cdrom


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Mount CDROM

Mount the cdrom to created mount location.

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom/

Copy – VMWare Tools Installer

Copy the installer to temporary folder.

cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.6.2-1688356.tar.gz /tmp/ or skip this step and directory extract from “/tmp” folder.

Extract – VMWare Tools Installer

After copying, decompress the tar file

cd /tmp

tar -zxvf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.6.2-1688356.tar.gz

Invoke Installer

Invoke the installer and follow the instructions, press “Enter” to accept the default values.

cd vmware-tools-distrib/

./vmware-install.pl


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Note: Ideally, you could press “Enter”, though read the instructions and press enter for each question; complete the installation and reboot the guest system.

VMWare Tools Installation – Verify

VMware tools daemon should be running upon completion and reboot of VMware tools installation process.

To verify run the ps command filtering “vmtoolsd” and to check details by running “ps -uw PID” as shown below

pgrep -l vmtoolsd

26882 vmtoolsd

ps -uw <pidof pgrep>

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND

root 26882 0.1 0.4 186916 4488 ? S 00:47 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd


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Troubleshooting Installation

Issue – ipconfig

Error: Unable to find the “ipconfig” program.

From Centos 7 onwards, IP configuration will be retrieved by command “ip addr”, so we need to install “net-tools” package. To net-tools package install run the command

yum install net-tools


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Issue – bad interpreter

Error: When you run the installer, “/usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory”.

To resolve the perl issue install run the command (install package)

yum install perl

Issue – Fuse Packages

Error: system does not have the required fuse packages installed

To resolve fuse issue, run the command (install package)

yum install fuse fuse-libs


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VMWare Tools Uninstallation

To uninstall VMWare tools, execute the command “vmware-uninstall-tools.pl”.

/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools

Technology

Install VMWare Tools CentOS 7