Smoothwall Firewall project

Thursday 12 November 2009

Upgrading VMware tools in your Jumpbox virtual appliance

If you migrate a Jumpbox virtual appliance between virtual hosts, for instance, form a VMware Server or VMware workstation to an ESXi server, the already installed configs and installed drivers maybe out of date or the wrong version, and the management screens will complain and let you know about it. This is very easily cured.

Firstly , make sure you have ssh enabled on your virtual machine, and log in as root or admin. Once logged in, go back to your management application, which for ESXi will be the vSphere Client, and select the virtual machine and select install vmware tools from the right button click on that virtual appliance.

This will have effectively mount an iso with the files on, which you must now mount from your ssh terminal window using a command like this:

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom - (you may need to create that directory)

They move into that directory and cp the file VMwareTools-4......(whatever).tar.gz to say /tmp

Go into /tmp and untar the above file, and then move into the directory it creates.

Run the following command and hit enter when asked, after reading the output, but for a standard Jumpbox, just hitting enter will do:

./vmware-install.pl

At the end of the process you can either reboot the virtual machine, or type in the following command:

/etc/init.d/networking stop; rmmod pcnet32; rmmod vmxnet; modprobe vmxnet; /etc/init.d/networking start

Make sure you have the semi colons and type it all on one line.

Voila, you now have the latest vmware tools, which means you are running the optimum networking drivers which is important for performance

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