A while back I upgrade my vCenter and vSphere environment to 5.5 Update 2. As part of this upgrade VMware Tools was upgraded on most servers. Except that is of vCenter itself. This wasn’t a major issue but other issues began to arise where alerts came for disk consolidation problems. On investigation of this most KB articles were pointing towards upgrading the VMware Tools and that should fix the problem. So that’s what I tried. When running the VMware Tools installation on the vCenter VM I got an error that the VMwareTools64.msi was not a valid installation package and to find the correct package to install. I tried a number of things to get this to work but it would just not run the VMwareTools64.msi. I also couldn’t update the VM through Update Manager either.

The first step was to get the correct VMware Tools version as a standalone ISO. Since I performed the upgrade VMware have released a new version of VMware Tools, now it’s version 10, and that’s the only one that can be downloaded from the support site. The version I’m looking for is 9.4.5 and I don’t want to install version 10 without doing prior deployment to the test environment. And this all led me to Vladan’s website article called Manual Download of VMware Tools from VMware Website. Thanks to this article I was quickly able to get the VMware Tools package that I needed.  You can go to http://packages.vmware.com/tools and select the VMware Tools version you need for download. The ISO was added to the ISO Datastore and mounted to the VM.

Following this I tried a number of different VMware KB articles but the one I finally found to work was KB1012693. This involved opening a command prompt, changing directory to the CD drive where VMware Tools was mounted and running the command:

setup64.exe /c

Once that completed I re-ran the VMTools installation and it completed successfully. Following the server reboot the VMTools are showing as up to date in vCenter.