Tuesday 31 July 2012

VMware Tools Unavailable - Not Any More :-)

I've had a small gripe with VMware Workstation 8.0.4 for a while, and only just got around to fixing it.

I use VMware on my ThinkPad ( running Ubuntu 12.04 ) to run various IBM products, including WAS, DB2, Portal, Connections etc. and was building out a new VM for a colleague, who needs WebSphere Portal 8.

Having done the usual things, including using yum update to update the installed OS ( Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 64-bit ) to the latest release, changing the root password etc. I wanted to install VMware Tools.

However, I kept seeing VMware Tools Unavailable in the VM menu ( and greyed out ).

As ever, Google had the answer ( because Google is my friend ). This particular post: -


Ever seen this on your VMware Workstation and wondered what the problem was?

There's a really simple answer.

Shut down the Virtual Machine
Edit Virtual Machine Settings
Click the Options Tab
Change the Guest Operating System from 'Other' to what it actually is.
Restart the Virtual Machine and Update / install VMware Tools.

When I checked, my Guest Operating System selection was, as expected, set to Other. I changed it to Linux / Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit I was able to select VMware Tools from the VM menu, which allowed me to mount the ISO image that contains the tools, and actually install them - which was nice.

10 comments:

THE GAME said...

Works great. Thank you for sharing.

nir@NJ@n said...

Thanks bro...Worked well :)

Dave Hay said...

nir@NJ@n - good news

Anonymous said...

شكرا بارك الله فيك

Edgar Eliam Santos said...

Gracias, me solucionaste el problema

Dave Hay said...

De nada, senor

sathish said...

Thanks dude it worked for me

Dave Hay said...

Sathish, great news :-)

Mark Sluser said...

Thank you for posting.

Mine was greyed out even though I had the correct setting of "UbuntU 64-bit".
Switching to "Ubuntu" and then back to "Ubuntu 64-bit" enabled the "Install VMware Tools".

Dave Hay said...

Hi Mark

Thanks for the comment. Glad it worked for you :-)

Cheers, Dave

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