How to install VMware Tools on Centos 6 with yum

Introduction

Often when managing a large number of systems you want to manage all software installs the same way. So when it comes to VMware Tools you may not want to follow the official instructions but instead install using yum, especially if you’re automating a large number of headless systems.

VMware makes their tools available via a web hosted yum repository, however this means you must also update the tools using yum. You server will show the tools status in vCenter as “Running (3rd-party/Independant)” and you will not be able to specify the “Update on boot” option in your vm settings.

Add repository

First we must add VMware’s repository. Create a new repository file with your text editor (we’ll use vi for now)

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware.repo

and add the following content

[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

Install Package

Once you’ve done this you can simply install the headless version of the tools (no X) with this simple command. You’ll need to accept the installation of the GPG key.

yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox

Updating VMware Tools

From now on if you need to update VMware Tools you can simply run

yum update vmware-tools-esx-nox

or as part of a regular yum update.

Removing VMware Tools

If you change your mind and want to remove VMware Tools or switch back to the tar and perl scripts method of installing VMware Tools simply run the following command to remove them.

yum remove vmware-tools-esx-nox