What's in the Release Notes

The release notes cover the following topics:

What's New
Earlier Releases of VMware Tools
Before You Begin
Internationalization
Compatibility
Installation and Upgrades for This Release
Product Support Notices
Resolved Issues
Known Issues

What's New

VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine.

Resolved Issues: This release of VMware Tools 10.0.8 addresses issues that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

Earlier Releases of VMware Tools

Before You Begin

Important note about upgrading to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or later

For resolution on incompatibility and general guidelines while upgrading ESXi hosts to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or ESXi 6.0 Update 1 or later, while using older versions of Horizon View Agent, please refer to the knowledge base articles below:

Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View Agent 5.3.5 or earlier hosted on ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or later fails with a black screen.
Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View agent 6.0.x or 6.1.x hosted on ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or later fails with a black screen.
Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View Agent 6.1.x hosted on ESXi 6.0 Update 1 or later fails with a black screen.

Internationalization

VMware Tools 10.0.8 is available in the following languages:

English
French
German
Spanish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese

Compatibility

VMware Tools 10.0.8 is compatible with supported versions of VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 and later, VMware Workstation 12.0 and VMware Fusion 8.0. See VMware Compatibility Guide for more information.

Guest Operating System Customization Support

The Guest OS Customization Support Matrix provides details about the guest operating systems supported for customization.

Installation and upgrades for this release

VMware Tools can be downloaded from the Product Download page.

VMware Tools Operating System Specific Packages can be downloaded from http://packages.vmware.com/tools/releases/index.html .

The steps to install VMware Tools vary depending on your VMware product and the guest operating system you have installed. For general steps to install VMware Tools in most VMware products, see General VMware Tools installation instructions (1014294) or the Installing and Configuring VMware Tools Guide.

For specific instructions to install, upgrade, and configure VMware Tools, see VMware Documentation page.

Product Support Notices

VMware Tools 10.0.8 enables support for DirectX 10.0 and OpenGL 3.3 on Windows guests when used with VMware Workstation 12.0, VMware Fusion 8.0 and a future release of VMware vSphere where the virtual device supports the required feature.

Resolved Issues

Virtual machine performance issues after upgrading VMware tools version to 10.0.x in NSX and VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.5.x
While upgrading VMware Tools version to 10.0x in a NSX 6.x and VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.5.x environment, the performance of the guest operating system in the virtual machine becomes slow and unresponsive. A number of operations like, logging in and logging off through an RDP session, response for an IIS website and launching applications become slow and unresponsive.

This issue occured due to a known issue with VMware Tools version 10.0.x. This issue is resolved in this release. For more information see KB 2144236.

Known Issues

The known issues are as follows:

Mac OS X guest shows only one resolution in Display Preferences
Virtual machines with Mac OS X 10.9 or later are limited to a single resolution choice (such as 1024x768) in System Preferences > Displays.

Workaround: After installing VMware Tools, the following command can be used in the guest to set a custom resolution:

sudo '/Library/Application Support/VMware Tools/vmware-resolutionSet' <width> <height>

Note: using the command without "sudo" is also possible, but the custom resolution won't persist after restarting the guest operating system.
If the effective resolution is smaller than requested, follow KB 1003 to increase the video memory size of the virtual machine.

On the Ubuntu 15.10 guest operating system, replacing open-vm-tools with the bundled VMware Tools version, might cause VMware Tools to work improperly
On the Ubuntu 15.10 guest, when you replace open-vm-tools with the VMware Tools version bundled with VMware Workstation 11.1.3 and VMware Fusion 7.1.3, VMware Tools does not work as expected. After you reboot the system, an Ubuntu crash report might appear and one of the services in VMware Tools might stop working.

Workaround: Use either of the following workarounds, depending on which is most appropriate for your situation.

Continue to use open-vm-tools. Do not use the bundled VMware Tools
If the bundled VMware Tools is installed, perform the following steps:

The status of IPv6 address is displayed as "unknown"
The status of IPv6 address from vim-cmd is displayed as "unknown" even when the address is valid.

Workaround: None.

Copying and pasting text between host and guest systems fail
Copy and paste of text between host and guest systems fail if the text size is 50KB or higher.

Workaround: Copy and paste smaller amount of text.

Installing VMware Tools on Windows 2000 Professional SP4 fails with an error
While installing ThinPrint drivers on Windows 2000 Professional SP4 with VMware Tools 10.0.8 fails with an error prompt.

Workaround: To workaround this issue, follow one of these recommendations as appropriate.

For users who have installed ThinPrint, it is recommended not to update VMware Tools to version 10.0.8.
For users who have not installed ThinPrint, it is recommended not to install ThinPrint with VMware Tools 10.0.8.

Using clobber option while installing VMware Tools on Linux guests might fail
Using clobber option while installing VMware Tools on Linux guests might fail while booting the virtual machine.

Workaround: To workaround this issue, use upstream drivers delivered by Linux kernel.

Definition of the field ipAddress in guestinfo is ambiguous
The field ipAddress is defined as Primary IP address assigned to the guest operating system, if known.

Workaround: The field ipAddress in this context for Linux is defined as the first IP address fetched by VMware Tools.

Reinstall VMware Tools is disabled in VMware Fusion after installing guest operating system
In VMware Fusion, menu option Reinstall VMware Tools is disabled after the installing Windows XP SP3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 guest operating system.

Note: This problem might appear only on some of the hosts and not all the hosts.

Workaround: To workaround this issue, shutdown and restart the virtual machine.

After installing VMware Tools 10.0.8 on a FreeBSD 10.x virtual machine, the guest might not shut down properly when performed from the Workstation Pro or Fusion interface
When you install VMware Tools 10.0.8 on a FreeBSD 10.x virtual machine, the VMware Tools service, vmtoolsd, might not launch. vmtoolsd runs in the background and is responsible for a variety of operations. A symptom you might encounter is that the guest operating system might not shutdown as intended when performed from the Workstation Pro or Fusion interface. For example, the first attempt to shutdown the guest might fail while the second attempt from the interface is converted into a virtual machine power off operation instead of a graceful shutdown.

Workaround: Use the VMware Tools version included with a previous version of Workstation Pro or Fusion.