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Configuring VMWare Tools stops the network

Posted October 31st, 2007 in VMWare

You can install Vmware Tools on a guest machine in VMware Server or VMWare Workstation using an SSH session, but after installing it, VMware Tools must be configured by issuing the vmware-config-tools.pl command. This configuration script actually stops the network connection completely, so you cannot install VMWare Tools from an ssh session and must do it directly in the virtual machine instead. If you attempt to do so you'll see a message like this:

It looks like you are trying to run this program in a remote session. This program will temporarily shut down your network connection, so you should only run it from a local console session. Are you SURE you want to continue?

So you need to run vmware-config-tools.pl from the VMWare Server Console or VMWare Workstation. The configuration tool started, and when I was running this in the VMWare Server Console I got the following message:

None of the pre-built vmhgfs modules for VMWare Tools is suitable for your running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmhgfs module for your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)?

This is to be expected. I didn't have a C compiler installed on this particular virtual machine and, although it would be quick and easy enough to install one I don't particularly want to. So I decided to see what would happen if I said "no". Basically this particular module is for the shared folders feature and so it didn't matter that it doesn't get installed, as I have no intention of using this feature. So that's OK.

It then asked me basically the same question but this time for the vmxnet module. Again, I answered that no, I don't want it to build the module for me. This time I was told the module is for the fast networking module. I'm not too bothered about this not being enabled so that's OK too.

It then checked to see if X was installed (which it isn't) and then started up the VMWare Tools Daemon. So far so good. Running chkconfig --list | grep vmware showed it was all set to start on system startup as well, so I'm happy this far. However, it never bothered to restore my network, so I had to manually start it again using ifup eth0 and ifup eth1. Other Linux distros which are not based on Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS will have different ways of checking to see if a service will auto start (chkconfig on CentOS etc) and bringing the network back up again (ifup on CentOS).