When you start an automatic upgrade of VMware Tools, you do not need to perform any operations in the guest operating system that is running on the virtual machine. The automatic upgrade uninstalls the previous version of VMware Tools, installs the latest version that is available for your ESXi host.

Automatic VMware Tools upgrade is supported only for virtual machines with Windows guest operating system.

Prerequisites

The following requirements are for each virtual machine in the upgrade:

  • Power on the virtual machine.
  • Verify that the guest operating system is running.

Procedure

  1. Select Automatic Tools Upgrade.
  2. (Optional) In the Advanced Options text box, enter advanced options for the Windows or Linux guest operating systems.
    Option Action
    Microsoft Windows Guest Operating Systems For the Windows guest operating system:
    • Enter /s /v "/qn" /l "Microsoft_Windows_location\filename.log" to perform a silent upgrade of VMware Tools and create a log file in the specified location on the guest operating system.
    Linux Guest Operating Systems For the Linux guest operating system:
    • Enter --default to perform a silent upgrade of VMware Tools and install the bin, lib, and doc files in the default /usr directory.

      This is the default behavior.

    • Enter --prefix=binary_location,lib_location,doc_location to perform a silent upgrade of VMware Tools and install thebin, lib, and doc files in the specified locations.
  3. Click OK.

Results

The VMware Tools label on the Summary tab changes to OK.