If you found this page, it means that have found that your Vmware tools stopped starting after your usual patching/upgrade maintenance and you are sick of reinstalling/reconfiguring your VMware tools. Welcome to this instruction of ditching the VMware tools and installing Open VM Tools for Linux VMs.

If you are not quite clear on why you would want to change to Open-VM-Tools then here are a couple of reasons

1. No need to reconfigure vmware tools after every kernel update. This removes the old problem of a Linux VM with tools installed, but not running.
2. Let the Guest manage the updates to vmware tools as part of your patch process

 

Procedure for CentOS/RHEL 7

1. Uninstall ye old VMware tools first!? As sudo or root enter the command

• # vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

.

2. Install open-vm-tools

• #?yum install -y?open-vm-tools

 

In RHEL or CentOS6 do the following to start it up

# service vmtoolsd start
# chkconfig vmtoolsd on

In RHEL or CentOS7 do the following to start it up

# systemctl start vmtoolsd
# systemctl on vmtoolsd

Easy right?