Installing VMware tools is one of the key parts to any virtual machine (VM) OS build process. VMware tools is a group of utilities that help enhance the overall performance of the VMs guest OS and improves management of the VM. If you were to operate without VMware tools installed the guest OS performance could potentially lacks some important functionality. I have put together some recommended steps showing how to install the VMware tools on Centos.

Option 1 – (Preferred by VMware) – VMware support the use of open-vm-tools

open-vm-tools is a set of an open source services and modules for VMware from third parties and contains utilities that enhances virtualisation, administration, management and functions of the VM in VMware environments.

# yum install open-vm-tools

Option 2:
1. Install the necessary prerequisites

# yum install perl gcc make kernel-headers kernel-devel -y

2. Attach VMware tools from vSphere client.
3. Mount the VMware tools package into /mnt

# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
mount: /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only

4. Copy VMware tool into the /tmp directory

# cd /mnt
# ls
manifest.txt   VMwareTools-5.5.0-xxxxxx.tar.gz   vmware-tools-upgrader-64
run_upgrader.sh   vmware-tools-upgrader-32
# cp VMwareTools-5.5.0-xxxxxx.tar.gz /tmp

5. Go into the /tmp directory and extract the VMware tools package

# cd /tmp
# tar xzvf VMwareTools-5.5.0-xxxxxx.tar.gz

6. cd into the extracted folder, vmware-tools-distrib

# cd vmware-tools-distrib
# ls
bin   doc   etc   FILES   INSTALL   installer   lib   vmware-install.pl

7. Run vmware-install.pl to start the installation

# ./vmware-install.pl

Once you see it’s finished, reboot and check that VMware tools is running:

8. Once sussessfully installed don’t forget to unmount the /mnt

# umount /mnt