Installing VMware tools on Centos 6 via yum

create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware.repoand we place this text in it:

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/rhel6/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub

If we installed previously VMware tools via the local vSphere, we will need to remove them using /usr/bin/vmware/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

We can now install VMware tools via yum:

yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox

In the first run, we will be asked to import the public key, and we have to answer y

After the install, it can happen the installer does not configure the daemon for automatic start. If we execute:

chkconfig --list

and we do not see vmware-tools in the list, we need to configure the auto-start. First of all we check if the startup script is present:

ll /etc/init.d/vmware-tools

If the script is there, we add it to the autostart list using these two commands, one after the other:

chkconfig --add vmware-tools
chkconfig vmware-tools on

We can finally start the daemon:

/etc/init.d/vmware-tools start