When speaking of virtualization, VMware is a solution that can’t be ignored. While the true power of virtualization lives in the datacenters, we live in the age where anyone can run a virtual machine or two on a desktop or a laptop, given it is equipped with enough resources. These virtual machines are computers running inside a computer, and this setup has countless benefits and use cases. For instance, if you have a new software you’d like to test, you can do so in a virtual machine before installing it directly on a device you use for everyday work.
To work with these virtual machines with ease, we can integrate them with our Hypervisor – in this case, VMware – to enable the operating system running as guest to use the capabilities of the virtualization software. In this tutorial we will install the integration software, called VMware Tools on a virtual machine running RHEL 8 / CentOS 8, that is hosted in VMware Player. The same in-guest steps apply on the datacenter version of VMware regarding the tools installation. Note however, that Red Hat ships the open-vm-tools
with the distribution, which is what VMware also recommends to use instead of the tools we’ll now install. Why are the tools shipped with the distribution recommended? They can be updated along with the distribution within the regular update process, while VMware’s tools need to be updated by hand (or automation, but unneeded effort anyway).
While the following steps will result in a working integration, please consider the above when you setting up your virtual systems. Outdated virtualization integration tools are a bad thing, which you will experience when you upgrade your hosts, and hundreds of alerts will appear on the vCenter consoles.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to download VMware tools using VMware Player
- How to present installation source to the virtual machine
- How to remove open-vm-tools
- How to install and configure VMware Tools
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