Installing VMware Tools on Centos 7 Minimal - cfloquetprojects/homelab GitHub Wiki

Pre-Flight:

Requisite Check:

• Centos 7 Box is networked, net-tools should be installed.
• Target VM is set to boot from host device, not from ISO used for install.

Installing Updates and Perl:

• We will need to update the host os as well as install perl to run the installation script for VMWare Tools.

[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ sudo yum update -y
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ sudo yum upgrade -y
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ sudo yum -y install perl
# We can verify a successful installation using the following:
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ perl -v

• Now that our pre-flight actions are complete we can shut down the VM and install VMWare tools.

Installing VMware Tools:

• On vCenter/ESXi right click on the target VM and go to Guest OS > Install VMWare Tools
• The VM will boot with the installation resources stored under /dev/cdrom, lets mount it.

[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ mkdir /mnt/cdrom
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz /tmp/
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ ls /tmp

• Now that we have the files copied to a temporary folder we can extract them, shown below:

[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ cd /tmp
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ tar -zxvf VMwareTools-version.tar.gz
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ cd vmware-tools-distrib
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d default

• Complete the screen prompts to install the VMware Tools. Options in square brackets are default choices and can be selected by pressing Enter.
• You may encounter an error about GCC installation, which you can reinstall using yum -y install gcc and then which gcc to find the installation directory.
• After the installation completes, you should be able to unmount the CD-ROM and reboot to take effect.

[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ umount /mnt/cdrom
[cfloquet@centos7 ~]$ reboot