For Solaris virtual machines, you manually install or upgrade VMware Tools by using the command line.

Prerequisites

  • Power on the virtual machine.
  • Verify that the guest operating system is running.
  • Because the VMware Tools installer is written in Perl, verify that Perl is installed in the guest operating system.

Procedure

  1. On the host, from the Workstation Pro menu bar, select VM > Install VMware Tools.
    If an earlier version of VMware Tools is installed, the menu item is Update VMware Tools.
  2. In the virtual machine, log in to the guest operating system as root and open a terminal window.
  3. If the Solaris volume manager does not mount the CD-ROM under /cdrom/vmwaretools, restart the volume manager. 
    /etc/init.d/volmgt stop
/etc/init.d/volmgt start
  4. Change to a working directory, for example, /tmp.
    cd /tmp
  5. Extract VMware Tools. 
    gunzip -c /cdrom/vmwaretools/vmware-solaris-tools.tar.gz | tar xf -
  6. Run the installer and configure VMware Tools. 
    cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

    Usually, the vmware-config-tools.pl configuration file runs after the installer file finishes running.

  7. Follow the prompts to accept the default values, if appropriate for your configuration.
  8. Follow the instructions at the end of the script.

    Depending on the features you use, these instructions can include restarting the X session, restarting networking, logging in again, and starting the VMware User process. You can alternatively reboot the guest operating system to accomplish all these tasks.

Results

What to do next

If a new virtual hardware version is available for the virtual machine, upgrade the virtual hardware.