So rather than messing around with the “community” version anymore, I set about figuring out how to actually get the official tools to work that came with VMware. (A problem which has happened to me on multiple clean installs, and for which I could never find a workable fix after a bit of web-searching.) In addition, in the vSphere Client you’re unable to get VMware to shut down or reboot the guest OS, even though it says that the tools are running in that VM but they are “3rd party.” The two big problems I had with it were that on start up and shut down, if I watched the text that quickly scrolled by I could make out a few lines complaining of some “FATAL” problem involving modules that were not found. This installation was relatively easy, but if you’re like me, you may have found that on a clean install of Ubuntu Server 12 LTS (圆4) it didn’t quite work. So maybe you tried to download & install open-vm-tools. So then you say to yourself “this is open source, so let’s use the open source community’s implementation of this – surely that will be easier!” However, you also may have found the instructions for how to go about installing those tools to fall short of success. After some initial web searches, you may have discovered that actually something DID happen – it mounted a virtual CD in the VM’s CDROM drive, which contains the tools & drivers you’re looking for. Perhaps your first impulse was to click on the same menu item mentioned above, which worked so well in Windows, only to find that nothing happened.

Sadly, you may not have been surprised to learn that it isn’t that easy when you try to do the same thing on an Ubuntu Linux server. You just open the VM’s console window, log on to the desktop and click on VM -> Guest -> Install/Upgrade VMware tools, and in a few seconds an installation begins, which requires you to do little more than click a Next button a bunch of times and reboot. If you’re like me, and are familiar with setting up virtual machines (VMs) on VMware 4 & 5 ESXi servers using Microsoft Windows, then you have probably gotten used to the simplicity and user-friendliness of installing the VMware tools in the operating system.

Ubuntu server vmware tools