Install VMware Tools on CentOS

In the past few weeks I had to update VMware Tools on couple of CentOS machines. Depending on which version of CentOS you are running, the process is different.

We will start with the easiest one, so if you have CentOS 7 all you have to do is run yum install -y open-vm-tools and once it’s installed you can check it by running ls /usr/bin/vmtoolsd. After the installation is finished you need to reboot the machine.

If you are running an older versio, CentOS 5.x/6 you will have first to go on vSphere, select the machine, go to Guest and choose Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.

After the ISO it’s attached to the VM you will have to mount it and create a folder:

mkdir /mnt/cdrom

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Next step is to create a folder, copy the content from the ISO and extract it.

cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz /tmp/

cd /tmp/

tar xvfz VMwareTools*.tar.gaz

Now you have run the installer and once finished reboot the machine.

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib

./vmware-install.pl -d (-d to auto accept defaults)