VMware RedHat yum reposetory for vmware tools (neat)

jibbajabba

No idea how I never knew it existed and missed it all the years. Had to install vmware tools on RHEL6 (minimal install) without any dev tools installed.

Thought I share that as I can't imagine I am the only guy who doesn't know it lol (needles to say it is now part of our kickstart file).

1. Check your vSphere version of the host.

Example : 5.0.0, 821926

Check here which build this is.

In this example 5.0.0 Patch Level 4

2. Check your RedHat version

[root@server ~]# uname -r 
[B]2.6.32-279.19.1.el6.x86_64[/B]

[root@server ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release 
[B]Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3 (Santiago)[/B]

To re-cap … You got here

a. vSphere 5.0.0 Patch Level 4
b. RedHat 6 (Standard Kernel, no PAE), 64Bit

3. Determine Correct Path

a. Browse to VMware
Index of /45848/tools/esx

b. Go into the folder of the above versions as determined above

- 5.0p04
-- rhel6
--- x86_64

Note the URL for future use

Index of /45848/tools/esx/5.0p04/rhel6/x86_64

4. Download and install the keys

# rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
# rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

5. Create Yum Repository

/etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo wrote:

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.0p04/rhel6/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

6. Install VMware Tools via YUM

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-kmods vmware-tools-esx

If you got a PAE kernel

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-kmods-PAE vmware-tools-esx

Done.

The VM will now display

VMware Tools: (?) Running (3rd-party) Independent

Done.

MentholMoose

This is my preferred method to install VMware Tools on RHEL and clones. One thing you can do differently is put the GPG key URLs in the repo file and let yum import them instead of running extra rpm commands. When you upgrade your hosts, you can update the repo file to point to the new repo and use yum update to upgrade the tools.

lordy

You can be even lazier and install the repo RPMs which will set up keys and repo files. I used these for ESX 5.1 and RHEL5 Clients:

Index of /45848/tools/esx/5.1/repos

P.S: I use vmware-tools-esx-nox which has no GUI support and is smaller.