Installing VMware tools on Centos 6 via yum

Luca Dell'Oca,

Yum is tha package manager used to install, remove and update sofware for linux distributions based on Red Hat, like Centos and Fedora.
It allows an easy management of installations and most of all updates, since by using yum upgrade we can check our local software lists against the available public repositories, check for new versions, and update the easily.

However, usually CentOS virtual machines have their VMware tools installed via the local binaries available from vSphere. It’s possible to configure Centos to install VMware Tools via yum.

First of all, we need to add the VMware repository. To do so, we create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware.repo and we place this text in it:

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/rhel6/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

If we installed previously VMware tools via the local vSphere, we will need to remove them using /usr/bin/vmware/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

We can now install VMware tools via yum:

yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox

In the first run, we will be asked to import the public key, and we have to answer y

After the install, it can happen the installer does not configure the daemon for automatic start. If we execute:

chkconfig --list

and we do not see vmware-tools in the list, we need to configure the auto-start. First of all we check if the startup script is present:

ll /etc/init.d/vmware-tools

If the script is there, we add it to the autostart list using these two commands, one after the other:

chkconfig --add vmware-tools
chkconfig vmware-tools on

We can finally start the daemon:

/etc/init.d/vmware-tools start
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Comments (8)

  1. When I did this, ESXi shows a 3rd party tools running, whereas using the included perl based installer for vmware tools didn’t have the same effect. Is this somehow different than the one that is included with ESXi? Using version 5.0 of the hypervisor.

  2. Yes is right, the tools are stated as unmanaged/third party because they have not been installed via the vSphere GUI via perl.
    There is no effect anyway, they work correctly. Only “problem” is you will not be able to upgrade them via vClient, but the goal of it all is right to use yum instead of vClient.

  5. As any RPM package managed by yum, the syntax is:

    yum remove package-name

  6. what if there is no script in /etc/init.d (as in my case), but it says it was installed correctly?

    1. i am in the same situation like wayne, do you have find a solution or the missing script?

      Thanks for answer 🙂

  7. If you are running RHEL6 or the like, VMware use the new ‘upstart’ service handler available. You can see vmware-tools status with “status vmware-tools” and restart with “restart vmware-tools”. The configuration file for this is located in /etc/init/vmware-tool.conf.

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