I have a couple of lab type vSphere setups that use Openfiler virtual machines for shared storage. For several months these have been running with out of date VMware tools. Several weeks ago I was able to upgrade these tools and wanted to share the required steps.
The first required task was to install a C Compiler — specifically gcc. While at it I updated all other components and shutdown the virtual machine:
conary updateall
conary update gcc
shutdown -h now
After the machine was powered down I added a virtual CD-ROM drive. This drive will be used to mount the VM tools ISO. After adding a CD-ROM drive the virtual machine can be powered back on. Select install/upgrade tools from the menu.
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cp VMwareTools* /mnt
tar zxvf /tmp/VMwareTools*
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
I accepted the defaults on the vmware-install.pl configuration script.