Installing VMware Tools

VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of a virtual machine's guest operating system and improves virtual machine management. For each guest OS, VMware provides a specific binary-compatible version of VMware Tools. The SDK requires that you install VMware Tools, or some operations related to the guest operating system fail.

Important: You must install the guest operating system before you install VMware Tools.

With VMware Tools installed on the guest OS, the virtual machine obtains its DNS (domain name server) name and an IP address and is therefore reachable over the network.

VirtualMachine includes three methods for automating installation and upgrade of VMware Tools.

MountToolsInstaller – Mounts the VMware Tools CD installer as a CD-ROM for the guest operating system. To monitor the status of the tools installallation, check GuestInfo.toolsStatus. Check GuestInfo.toolsVersionStatus and GuestInfo.toolsRunningStatus for related information.
UnmountToolsInstaller – Unmounts the VMware Tools installer CD.
UpgradeToolsTask – Performs an upgrade of VMware Tools. This method assumes VMware Tools has been installed and is running. The method takes one argument, InstallerOptions, which allows you to specify command-line options passed to the installer to modify the installation procedure for tools.

Use theToolsConfigInfo data object in VirtualMachineConfigSpec.toolsInfo property to specify the settings for the VMware Tools software running on the guest operating system.