VM Tools not working.

[SoCalRox]

Freshly installed Xubuntu VM, VMWare player 15.04 build 12990004, Xubuntu 19.04. Win 10 1903 host, 8GB/256GB, i5-6300U

 

VMWare tools is installed, but for the life of me, I cannot get the VM to kick it up to 1920x1080. I have other, higher resolutions available, but not the one I want to use. Ideas?

 

 

 

[Brandon H Supervisor]

if you're using the official VMWare tools uninstall that and install open-vm-tools the open-source version is much better supported these days

[Ve7878]

19.04 has the open-vm-tools included. Anyway this can be resolved by following the instructions on this thread:

 

https://askubuntu.com/a/556836

[Brandon H Supervisor]

  On 03/05/2019 at 15:37, Vince800 said:

19.04 has the open-vm-tools included. Anyway this can be resolved by following the instructions on this thread:

 

https://askubuntu.com/a/556836

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If he manually installed the VMWare tools from VMWare Player it may have overwritten the open-vm-tools though; if the open tools are working correctly then it should auto-resize as needed without needing to use a manual script. no need to manually change resolution in settings either. it would sync with host resolution and adjust based on window size or if in full-screen.

 

Xubuntu may or may not have the package by default since it's a spin of Ubuntu meant to be lighter so could have some packages cut from the default install

[Ve7878]

  On 03/05/2019 at 15:41, Brandon H said:

If he manually installed the VMWare tools from VMWare Player it may have overwritten the open-vm-tools though; if the open tools are working correctly then it should auto-resize as needed without needing to use a manual script. no need to manually change resolution in settings either. it would sync with host resolution and adjust based on window size or if in full-screen.

 

Xubuntu may or may not have the package by default since it's a spin of Ubuntu meant to be lighter so could have some packages cut from the default install

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Regardless 1920x1080 isn't present in the list of resolutions unless as you say, he wants to run it fullscreen and 1920x1080 is his native resolution then yes, it should automatically do this when he goes fullscreen.

[SoCalRox]

  On 03/05/2019 at 15:27, Brandon H said:

if you're using the official VMWare tools uninstall that and install open-vm-tools the open-source version is much better supported these days

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That was my original install, but absolutely nothing worked with it. No sharing of the hosts folders, no screen settings... zilch.

[SoCalRox]

Vince- thanks for the link. I knew xrandr would do the job but have been off of Linux for a few months and couldn't recall the dang name.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

  On 03/05/2019 at 15:56, SoCalRox said:

That was my original install, but absolutely nothing worked with it. No sharing of the hosts folders, no screen settings... zilch.

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that's unusual. must be because 19.04 is still rather new and proper support hasn't been added to the open-source tools yet.

 

glad you got it working though

[SoCalRox]

That was my thought- it must be something conflicting in the new release. I shoulda known better than to go with the latest!

[SoCalRox]

By the way, Brandon- I have another Ubuntu VM (this one is Lubuntu) on 19.04 and it, as well, has the "open source" tools installed, and they are no working. Completely different VM. Must be something needs tweaking.

[Ve7878]

I've only tested Kubuntu 19.04 as KDE is the only DE I can tolerate. open-vm-tools worked flawlessly on it so I find that really strange, but then I'm using Workstation so it could be an issue with VMware player perhaps.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

been awhile but I may have an answer while facing this issue myself and thought of this thread

 

I was messing with Linux for the first time in a long while and was having the same issue with VMWare. Doing a bit of googling of my own it seems it's become a common issue the past few years with VMWare Tools in Linux. The service isn't starting up right and VMWare doesn't seem to care enough to research and fix the issue.

 

I came across the following issue page that has a working workaround and a few permanent fix suggestions https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/issues/303

 

the work around is to restart the open-vm-tools service every time you reboot the VM

 

systemctl restart open-vm-tools.service

 

Arch version of restart command:

systemctl restart vmtoolsd.service

 

the permanent fixes didn't work for me while I was testing Arch so I just created a desktop shortcut for the service restart.

[Dhruv Mehta]

VMware tools need to be installed and running on vApp. If VMware tools do not work correctly, some VMs can migrate to a not compatible host and then go back to the original host. In vCenter appears a message like: VMware tools are not running on virtual machine: [message]
The issue can occur during consolidation phase.
Possible solutions: control if VMware Tools are running on vCenter in the VM summary tab or directly on VM console through by the command service vmware-tools status. If the tools are stopped, reboot VM or launch the command service vmware-tools start on VM console.