VMware Tools Upgrade

Overview

It is recommended to leave the VMware Tools at their installation level and not upgrade them on the Swivel appliances.

This process details the VMware Tools Upgrade

Prerequisites

Swivel VMware appliance

Backup/Snapshot of the Swivel installation

How to Upgrade Swivel VMware appliance VMware Tools

It is suggested that you take an offline (Power Off) snapshot if possible, before performing this - although this is not entirely necessary.

The procedure is the same as a RedHat 4 Linux box.

Right click the machine, select Guest -> Install VMware Tools. This will insert the virtual CD containing the VMware Tools tar file. You can either do this automatically (doesn't always work or sometimes greyed out) or manually. To do this manually:

Mount the CD and run the script:

 [admin@appliance ~]# mkdir /mnt/cdrom
 [admin@appliance ~]# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom [admin@appliance ~]# cd /mnt/cdrom [admin@appliance cdrom]# cp VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz /root   [admin@appliance cdrom]# cd /root [admin@appliance root]# tar -xzvf VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz

(Note: your version may have a different filename to the above)

 [admin@appliance root]# cd vmware-tools-distrib/ 
 [admin@appliance vmware-tools-distrib]# ./vmware-install.pl

At this point, the installer will either upgrade, or prompt you to uninstall the older version.

Note: ***You can accept all the defaults, however please avoid installing experimental packages if prompted***

If it asks you to manually uninstall then you need to determine the existing packages like this:

 [admin@appliance ~]# rpm -qa | grep vmware
 vmware-open-vm-tools-common-8.3.12-493255.el4
 vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-8.3.12-493255.el4
 vmware-open-vm-tools-nox-8.3.12-493255.el4
 vmware-tools-nox-8.3.12-493255.el4
 vmware-tools-common-8.3.12-493255.el4

Then use rpm -ev to remove them:

 rpm -ev vmware-open-vm-tools-common-8.3.12-493255.el4
 rpm -ev vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-8.3.12-493255.el4
 rpm -ev vmware-open-vm-tools-nox-8.3.12-493255.el4
 rpm -ev vmware-tools-nox-8.3.12-493255.el4
 rpm -ev vmware-tools-common-8.3.12-493255.el4

Each package may be dependent on the other, so if it informs you of this, you may need to uninstall the vmware package that is dependent upon the one you attempted to uninstall first.

Hence, you may need to change the order in which you uninstall these packages.

After uninstalling these, then attempt to run the script again.

 [admin@appliance ~]# cd /root/vmware-tools-distrib/ [admin@appliance vmware-tools-distrib]# ./vmware-install.pl

Note: ***You can accept all the defaults, however please avoid installing experimental packages if prompted***

After installation, check the Summary screen within VMware and you should find that the machine is no longer "complaining" about the VMware Tools package being out of date.