Last but not least, one big point after create VM is install VMware tools. Mostly people don’t understand why we must to setup this important plugin. In accordance to VMware KB 340: “VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machines guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine”

By installing VMware tools, we can eliminates also improves these issue:

  • Low video resolution
  • Inadequate color depth
  • Incorrect display of network speed
  • Restricted movement of the mouse
  • Inability to copy and paste and drag-and-drop files
  • Missing sound
  • Provides the ability to take quiesced snapshots of the guest OS
  • Synchronizes the time in the guest operating system with the time on the host
  • Provides support for guest-bound calls created with the VMware VIX API

Basically if we created a VM which not provided GUI, this could be not helpful poin. But, afterall i always setup VMware tools whenever i’ve done installed new VM for whatever OS.

Then i’ll show you how to install VMware tools on Linux environment. This steps should work on any distro, particularly just different on a few command. For this scenario i used distro SLES.

First, you must to assign command “install vmware tools” from your vClient/vCenter/Workstation.

vmware tools install1

Login into your Linux terminal using root privileged and let’s make virtual cdrom for mounting image VMware tools.

root:~#mkdir /mnt/cdrom

Mount the image into your virtual cdrom.

root:~#mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom or mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom

vmware tools install2

Go to folder /mnt/cdrom and show content. It should consist file VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxx.tar.gz.

Let’s extract that file into temporary folder and start to install it.

cd /mnt/cdrom

tar xzvf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxx.tar.gz -C /tmp/

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/

sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d

Note: The -d parameter means defaults, so you don’t get all those prompts for default paths and so on.

vmware tools install3

Wait for installation finish and reboot your OS after that.

Once you’ve back after reboot let’s check the service whether it is running or not.

ps aux | grep -i vmware

if it shows “/usr/sbin/vmtoolsd” process, mean you have successfully install VMware tools.

**If you are getting “permission denied” during the installation, please use following command instead ” perl vmware-install.pl”