Installing VMware Tools

VMware Tools is a set of drivers and utilities that you install on the guest operating system of a virtual machine to enhance the performance of the guest OS. VMware Tools also improve the management of the virtual machine. For each guest OS, VMware provides a specific binary-compatible version of VMware Tools.

Before you install VMware tools, you must install and boot the guest operating system.

To mount and unmount the VMware Tools installer CD as a CD-ROM for the guest operating system, use the methods of the com.vmware.vcenter.vm.tools.Installer interface.

To mount the VMware Tools, call the connect(vm_ID) method of the Installer interface. On Windows guest operating systems with activated Autorun feature, this method automatically initiates the installation of the VMware Tools and requires a user input to complete. On other guest operating systems, this method only mounts the VMware Tools disk image on the virtual CD/DVD drive and the user is required to do some guest OS-specific actions. For example, for some Linux distributions, the user is required to extract the contents of the VMware Tools installation archive and run the installer.

To unmount the VMware Tools installer CD image from the virtual CD/DVD drive, call the disconnect(vm_ID) method of the Installer interface.

To monitor the status of the VMware Tools installation, you can first retrieve the properties of the VMware Tools by calling the get(vm_VM) method of the com.vmware.vcenter.vm.Tools interface. The method returns a ToolsTypes.Info object which you can use to call the getVersionStatus() and getRunState() methods.

To upgrade the VMware Tools, call the upgrade(vm_ID, commandLineOptions) method of the Tools interface. The method takes as arguments the ID of the virtual machine on which the VMware Tools is installed and running. Use the commandLineOptions argument to specify the command-line options that you want to pass to the installer to modify the tools installation procedure. You can monitor the upgrade operation in the same way you monitor the installation operation.

To update the properties of the VMware Tools, call the update(vm_ID, update_spec) method of the Tools interface. Pass as argument a ToolsTypes.UpdateSpec object and define the tools upgrade policy settings for the virtual machine by calling the setUpgradePolicy(upgradePolicy) method.