Apr 7, 2012 Posted by newlife007 on Apr 7, 2012 in Virtualization | 2 comments

Installing and updating ESXi 5 VMtools with OSP

Recently I had the pleasure of building n ESXi Hypervisor 5 server. Server sprawl has taken over and the time has come to consolidate. The first VM’s to create are my web and database servers. After the build I was needing to install VMtools to get the full functionality on my CentOS / SL / RHEL 6 servers.

There are several ways to do this but a way to add a repo and have it install updates when I update the servers is a better way, so that lead me to OSP (Operating System Specific Packages).

Checking the internet I found Operating System Specific Packages pdf that describes the process here.

The process I used here is for CentOS 6.2 / RHEL 6.2 and SL (Scientific Linux) 6.2. First I downloaded and imported the RSA and DSA certificates.

# wget http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
# wget http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

# rpm --import VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub
# rpm --import VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub

Now lets create the repo file. Name it vmwaretools.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d directory with the following contents.

[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.0/rhel6/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Save the file and type:

# yum update

And let the repository populate the information you need. Now we need to install the correct tools. Since I am using ESXi Hypervisor 5 I am limited to 1 CPU so I really don’t need to look and see if I have PAE enabled kernels. If I did, we would need to check using uname -r and look for the PAE designation in the kernel release.

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-kmods vmware-tools-esx

Once the tools have been downloaded and installed all that is needed is a reboot.

 

 

2 Responses to “Installing and updating ESXi 5 VMtools with OSP”

1. Håvard Sørli says:

   April 25, 2012 at 6:09 am

   The import of the keys can be done in one step with rpm

   rpm –import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
   rpm –import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

   Reply
   • newlife007 says:

     April 25, 2012 at 10:09 am

     That is true, you can run the command with a single line, my point was to show both commands. Thanks for the addition!

     Reply

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