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, and if necessary, reboots the virtual machine.

Automatic VMware Tools upgrade is not supported for virtual machines with Solaris or NetWare guest operating systems.

Prerequisites

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

■

Power on the virtual machine.

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Verify that the guest operating system is running.

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To determine whether you have the latest version of VMware Tools, look on the Summary tab for the virtual machine.

Procedure
1

Select Automatic Tools Upgrade.

2

(Optional) In the Advanced Options field, enter advanced options for the guest operating system.

Option

Description

Microsoft Windows Guest Operating Systems

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
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Enter --default to perform the default behavior. Perform a silent upgrade of VMware Tools. Install tools bin, lib and doc files in the default /usr directory.

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Enter --prefix=binary_location,lib_location,doc_location to perform a silent upgrade of VMware Tools and install the binary, library, and document files in the specified locations.
3

Click OK.

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

Important

When you upgrade VMware Tools on Linux guest operating systems, new network modules are available but are not used until you either reboot the guest operating system or stop networking, unload and re-load the VMware networking kernel modules, and then restart networking. This behavior means that even if VMware Tools is set to automatically upgrade, you must reboot or re-load network modules to make new features available.

This strategy avoids network interruptions and allows you to work with VMware Tools over SSH.

What to do next

Upgrade the virtual machine hardware to version 8.