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You are here: Home / Automation / Quick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications

Quick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications

11.08.2024 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

If you have a Virtual Machine that has VMware Tools installed and a newer version is available, end users within the guest operating system might see a status bar notification with the following message:

A newer version of Tools is available for this VM

Most organizations already have a well defined process in rolling out new software updates including VMware Tools, so while the in-guest notification about a new version of VMware Tools can be useful for some, it either not applicable or adds unnecessary distractions for their end users. I recently learned that you can disable these in-guest notification by applying one of the following configurations:

Windows

  • Disable VMware Tools notification at system Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • Disable VMware Tools In-Guest Notification at the user Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)

Feedback has already been acknowledge to add this information to the official VMware Tools documentation and that it may be possible to configure these notification settings using the VMware Tools configuration file (tools.conf) in the future, further simplifying any configurations related to VMware Tools.

More from my site

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  • Enhancements to VMware Tools 12 for Container Application Discovery in vSphere 
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  • Application Discovery in vSphere with VMware Tools 11

Categories // Automation Tags // vmware tools

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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