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You are here: Home / ESXi-Arm / Installing VMware Tools on Raspberry Pi OS for ESXi-Arm

Installing VMware Tools on Raspberry Pi OS for ESXi-Arm

10.15.2020 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Now that you have Raspberry Pi (rPI) OS running as a VM on ESXi-Arm, the next thing you will probably want to install is VMware Tools, especially useful to see the IP Address of your Guest if you are using DHCP and for enabling guest "soft" shutdown using the vSphere UI. Below are the instructions

Step 1 - Open Terminal after rPI OS has booted up and enable SSH

sudo systemctl enable ssh
sudo systemctl start ssh

Step 2 - Obtain the IP Address of your rPI OS and SSH to the system with the username pi and the password you had configured during the setup of rPI OS as a VM

Step 3 - Change to root and pull latest updates by running the following two commands:

sudo su -
apt update

Step 4 - Clone Open VM Tools repo and change into the inner directory by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools.git
cd open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools/

Step 5 - Install the following packages which will be needed to compile VMware Tools from source:

apt install -y automake libtool libmspack-dev libglib2.0-dev libpam0g-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev libxtst-dev libgtk2.0-dev

Step 6 - Run the following commands to build and install VMware Tools:

autoreconf -i
./configure --without-x
make
make install
ldconfig

Step 7 - We need to create a new systemd unit file so that we can manage the VMware Tools service, do to so, run the following command:

cat > /etc/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=
Description=Open VM Tools
After=
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd
Restart=always
RestartSec=1sec

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Step 8 - Enable and start the VMware Tools service by running the following command:

systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
systemctl start vmtoolsd.service

If everything was successfully installed and configured, you should be able to see that the status of VMware Tools is now running for your rPI OS running on ESXi-Arm!

More from my site

  • Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • Hybrid (x86 and Arm) Kubernetes clusters using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • VEBA + Knative + k3s on ESXi-Arm
  • How to build a customizable Raspberry Pi OS Virtual Appliance (OVA)?
  • Stateless ESXi-Arm with Raspberry Pi

Categories // ESXi-Arm Tags // Arm, Raspberry Pi, vmware tools

Comments

  1. Aallon says

    10/16/2020 at 4:27 am

    We can run android os?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/16/2020 at 5:37 am

      Try it out and let us know! I know in the past customers have ran Android OS for x86, but haven't looked into it

      Reply
  2. Marco says

    11/27/2020 at 7:09 am

    Thanks, I executed the steps on Ubuntu server 20.4 arm edition VM under ESXi on a Raspberry Pi 4 and it also works for that guest system

    Reply
  3. Bob says

    01/01/2021 at 2:15 pm

    This works pretty well, it now shows

    "Running, version:2147483647 (Guest Managed)"

    however I do get an error:

    "This virtual machine failed to become vSphere HA Protected and HA may not attempt to restart it after a failure."

    I'm running vCenter Server 7.0.1

    Reply
  4. Travis Thorne says

    04/24/2021 at 10:11 pm

    Hi,

    Thanks heaps for this guide.

    I copied & pasted the commands you listed above into a shell script, it work great .Thanks!

    install-vmware-tools.sh :

    ```
    #!/bin/sh

    # Change to root and pull latest updates by running the following two commands:

    sudo apt update

    # Clone Open VM Tools repo and change into the inner directory by running the following commands:

    git clone https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools.git
    cd open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools/

    # Install the following packages which will be needed to compile VMware Tools from source:

    sudo apt install -y \
    automake libtool libmspack-dev libglib2.0-dev \
    libpam0g-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev \
    libx11-dev libxext-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev \
    libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev libxtst-dev libgtk2.0-dev

    # Run the following commands to build and install VMware Tools:

    autoreconf -i
    ./configure without-x
    make
    sudo make install
    sudo ldconfig

    # We need to create a new systemd unit file so that we can
    # manage the VMware Tools service, do to so, run the following command:

    cat | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service << EOF
    [Unit]
    Description=
    Description=Open VM Tools
    After=
    After=network-online.target
    [Service]
    ExecStart=
    ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd
    Restart=always
    RestartSec=1sec
    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target
    EOF

    # Enable and start the VMware Tools service by running the following command:

    sudo systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
    sudo systemctl start vmtoolsd.service
    ```

    Reply
    • Travis Thorne says

      04/24/2021 at 10:18 pm

      oops, int the script I pasted, the line:
      ./configure without-x
      should be:
      ./configure --without-x

      Reply
  5. Mike says

    03/14/2023 at 10:52 pm

    Is there a way to copy file(s) from the first VM to other VM's to install the vmtools without having to go through the entire build process?

    Reply
  6. Mike Pate says

    05/19/2023 at 9:04 pm

    William,
    I run the steps above on the RaspiOS i386 image. There were no errors but I can't get the vmtoolsd service to start. Any ideas?

    Reply
    • Michael Alan Pate says

      05/19/2023 at 9:07 pm

      More details... it appears to start for a few seconds, then when I get the status of the service, here is the response:

      ● vmtoolsd.service - Open VM Tools
      Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
      Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2023-05-19 23:05:37 CDT; 14s ago
      Process: 8799 ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
      Main PID: 8799 (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
      CPU: 574us

      Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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