Updating VMware Tools on Red Hat Enterprise/Scientific/CentOS Linux 6 for VMware ESXi 5

With the upgrade to ESXi 5 the update process for the tools installed from the repository is not very seamless because of some update issues in addition to package changes.

First off, to get the VMware tools packages updated it is important to upgrade to the latest version of Red Hat/Scientific/CentOS Linux 6 due to some issues with the yum version distributed originally with 6.0. VMware has disabled the automatic update due to this issue:

http://packages.vmware.com/tools/docs/engineering-release-notes/rhel-upgrade

I am using Scientific Linux 6, for Red Hat and CentOS the upgrade process should be similar but most likely will have a few differences. Be careful to test your software installed because doing the following procedure will result in a minor version upgrade (6.1 at the time of this writing):

https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade.6x

Now it is time to get the VMware tools updated. First you will want to remove the old version distributed from the package repository. The other VMware tools packages should be automatically removed since they depend on this kernel module.

# yum remove vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod

Verify all VMware tools packages are removed, RPM should return no results. Remove any additional VMware packages if necessary.

# rpm -qa | grep vmware

Now you’ll need to edit the original yum repo file created for the VMware tools repository:

# nano /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo

Modify the “baseurl” directive to be similar to below.

baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.0/rhel6/i386

I am using the 32-bit Linux version so I have i386 at the end, substitute x86_64 if using the 64-bit version.

Now you need to clean out the cached info about the repositories so that it will read the package info from the modified VMware repo:

# yum clean all

Install the kernel module packages:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-kmods

If you are using the PAE kernel you’ll need to append “-PAE”  or “-pae” with no space before at the end of the command above.

Time to install the new VMware tools, in my case I’ll install without graphical components since my Linux servers don’t run with a GUI:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox

Or use this if your Linux VM is running with a graphical interface:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx

That should do it. Your VMware tools should now be updated to the latest version available with ESXi 5.