Upgrading VMware Tools in an already configured shared productLocker

[atalbo]

Hello,

I have been looking through several guides of lifecycle management articles of VMware Tools but not found out this (hopefully) easy and straight forward answer. How do you upgrade the VMware Tools version when you already have configured a shared productLocker for your hosts?

Case

• Environment where all hosts already have been configured for a shared productlocker for example: /vmfs/volumes/sharedds01/productLocker/
• VMware Tools 10.1.10

Goal

• Upgrade VMware Tools to 10.1.15

What would be the proper way to upgrade VMware Tools to 10.1.15 ?

1. Can you simply replace all the files in productLocker on the datastore without reboots required?
2. .. or do you need to:
   1. Create a new directory with VMw Tools 10.1.15, something like /vmfs/volumes/sharedds01/productLocker2/
   2. Update UserVars.ProductLockerLocation
   3. Reboot ESXis / Create new symlinks

[mhampto]

The mechanism to attach the tools iso to a VM grabs the name and verify's the signature file.  If it is a windows machine simply swapping the files out will still load the windows.iso when attaching tools to a VM.

I have not tried this, though this option should work without issue.

[atalbo]

Thank you for your answer.

I would be happy if there was a documented official way to do this.

Everything points to just replacing the files should work but without having actual official documentation/statements to back this up it feels experimental and maybe dangerous in a production environment.

[daphnissov]

When you replace the VMware Tools bundles in the shared product locker, as of ESXi 6.5 the hosts scan for updated tools every 5 minutes as opposed to only when VMs power on. An alert will be displayed if a newer version of tools are found. Source: What's New in VMware vSphere 6.5 whitepaper (PDF), page 15.