How to install VMware Tools on Linux

How to install VMware Tools on Linux

Installing VMware Tools on a Linux machine requires a few extra steps compared to Windows. Though with these instructions it should be quite easy even for a non-linux person to install VMware Tools.

VMware Tools on Linux

1. Right click the virtual machine you wish to install VMware Tools on, select Guest – Install/Upgrade VMware Tools. This will mount the ISO image to your virtual machine
2. Open an SSH or console session to your Linux server. In this example I logged in as root
3. [root@server]# cd /mnt (Change to the mnt directory)
4. [root@server mnt]# mkdir cdrom (Make a directory called cdrom)
5. [root@server mnt]# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom (Mounts the CDROM into the directory /mnt/cdrom)
6. [root@server mnt]# cd /tmp (Change to the /tmp directory this is where we will extract the CDROM contents to)
7. [root@server tmp]# tar zxf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.4.15-2827462.tar.gz (Extracts the file to the /tmp directory. NOTE your file might be a different version)
8. [root@server tmp]# umount /dev/cdrom (Unmount/Eject the CDROM)
9. [root@server tmp]# cd vmware-tools-distrib (Change directory into the vmware-tools-distrib folder)
10. [root@server vmware-tools-distrib]# ./vmware-install.pl (Start the installations script. I usually accept all defaults)
11. VMware tools is now installed on your machine
12. Optional you can now delete the folder contents of the extracted VMware tools
13. [root@server vmware-tools-distrib]# cd /tmp (Change back to tmp directory)
14. [root@server tmp]# rm -rf vmware-tools-distrib (Deletes the folder vmware-tools-distrib and all its contents)

 

Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.