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!
We can run android os?
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
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
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
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
```
oops, int the script I pasted, the line:
./configure without-x
should be:
./configure --without-x
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?
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?
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