If you are managing VMs with VMWare Workstation or VMWare ESXi, you will be familiar with VMWare Tools which is recommended to be installed after setting up a new VM due to the Drivers they provide which can help speed up the VM and you can easily Restart or Shutdown VMs from the VMWare Workstation or VSphere Client console. For Windows this is easy to do with a couple button clicks but what if you have to install VMWare Tools on a Linux VM that only has Shell Access with no GUI? I will show you the following steps using CentOS 6.5 Installation.
1) After finishing your CentOS OS installation, you will see a Pop Up in the VM console below. Click on Install Tools.
2) You will see that the VMWare Tools has been mounted to the Virtual CD Drive.
3) Create a place where you can Mount and Access the Virtual CD Drive by typing in the following commands.
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
4) Now Mount the Virtual CD Drive to the Folder you created specifically for this.
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
5) Copy the VMwareTools-(version_number).tar.gz to the folder local to the OS. (/usr/src is used in this example as the destination folder)
cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-(version_number).tar.gz /usr/src
6) Un-mount the Virtual CD Drive. (This is optional)
umount /mnt/cdrom
7) Go to the folder where you copied the VMWare Tools and extract the Tar file.
tar -zxf VMwareTools-(version_number).tar.gz
8) Check that the folder was extracted successfully by using the “ls” command. The folder should be “vmware-tools-distrib”.
ls
9) Enter the “vmware-tools-distrib” folder and run the following command to start the VMWare Tools Installation.
./vmware-install.pl
10) The installation will ask where you want to install the binary files. Just press Enter if you want to accept the default location.
11) The installation will ask where your init directories is. Just press Enter if the default directory is correct.
12) The installation will ask where your init scripts directory is. Just press Enter if the default directory is correct.
13) The installation will ask where you want to install the daemon files. Just press Enter if you want to accept the default location.
14) The installation will ask where you want to install the library files. Just press Enter if you want to accept the default location.
15) Press Enter at this stage as it will create that folder.
16) The installation will ask where you want to install the documentation files. Just press Enter if you want to accept the default location.
17) Press Enter at this state as it will create that folder.
18) Press Enter at this state so that it will configure your VMWare Tools Installation.
19) At this state, it will be up to you if you want to Share Folders between the Host OS and the Guest OS. I usually select no for this.
20) At this state, it will be up to you if you want to allow dragging or copying files between the Host OS and the Guest OS. Because I don’t have a GUI running, I usually go with no for this.
21) Press Enter at this state.
22) At this state, it will be up to you if you want to share the printer from the Host OS to the Guest OS. I usually select no for this.
The installation should now be complete and that is all! 🙂