Introduction

Installing VMware Tools on Linux operating systems (OS) used to be harder than it is now. You had to mount the ISO, copy the correct package to the guest OS, unzip it, and then run through the installation steps.

Fortunately it’s now much easier, because there is an open source package called open-vm-tools located in the official Ubuntu packages repository.

How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10

So how do you install VMware Tools on Ubuntu?

Brace yourself for some heavy reading, are you ready?

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools -y

See, I told you it was easy.

Now if you’re running VMware Tools on Ubuntu Desktop, you may also want to install the GUI package using the following command.

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

That’s it, VMware Tools will now be installed. If for some reason the open source VMware Tools does not work as expected, you can remove the package and install it using the latest version from VMware using the steps below.

How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Using the ISO

If for some reason you want to install VMware Tools using the ISO image, follow the steps below.

Step 1: Connect the VMware Tools ISO to the Virtual Machines CD-ROM Drive by Clicking VM > Install VMware Tools..

Step 2: Mount the CD-ROM drive inside the Ubuntu Guest OS

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Step 3: Copy the ISO image to the tmp folder

cd tmp
sudo cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-10.0.10-4301679.tar.gz /tmp

Step 4: Extract the VMware Tools archive and run the installer

tar -zxvf VMwareTools-10.0.10-4301679.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Press Enter accepting all the default options during the installation wizard.

After confirming the defaults for all options, VMware Tools will be installed. You may need to restart the server for all changes to take affect.