Yum is tha package manager used to install, remove and update sofware for linux distributions based on Red Hat, like Centos and Fedora.
It allows an easy management of installations and most of all updates, since by using yum upgrade we can check our local software lists against the available public repositories, check for new versions, and update the easily.
However, usually CentOS virtual machines have their VMware tools installed via the local binaries available from vSphere. It’s possible to configure Centos to install VMware Tools via yum.
First of all, we need to add the VMware repository. To do so, we create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware.repo and we place this text in it:
[vmware-tools] name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever – $basearch baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/rhel6/$basearch enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub
If we installed previously VMware tools via the local vSphere, we will need to remove them using /usr/bin/vmware/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl
We can now install VMware tools via yum:
yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox
In the first run, we will be asked to import the public key, and we have to answer y
After the install, it can happen the installer does not configure the daemon for automatic start. If we execute:
chkconfig --list
and we do not see vmware-tools in the list, we need to configure the auto-start. First of all we check if the startup script is present:
ll /etc/init.d/vmware-tools
If the script is there, we add it to the autostart list using these two commands, one after the other:
chkconfig --add vmware-tools chkconfig vmware-tools on
We can finally start the daemon:
/etc/init.d/vmware-tools start