VMware Tools Upgrade for VI3

[m_d_sella]

I currentyl have three ESX 2.5.1 in production and have started our upgrade/migration process to VI3. I have the luxury of seven new servers and as such have opted for a parallel upgrade path. I have successfully upgraded Virtual Center and have ESX 3.0.1 configured and running on all seven of the new servers. So far the VM migration has worked very well and we have 8 VMs up and running in the new environment.

During the migration process, however, I have run into a problem on several of the VMs relating to the VMware Tools upgrade. It appears that with certain version of VMware Tools the upgrade to the version in VI3 does not work. I have seen a few posts in various forums that describe the same problem, where the VM Tools installer cannot remove the older version of VMware Tools. It appears to be looking for the old installer package. I was able to retrieve the VM Tools package from my ESX 2.5.1 server and was able to update to that version of the tools in my VMs. However, after this update, I run into a very similar problem with the new VM Tools package. End result now is that I cannot upgrade and cannot uninstall the old version. When I try to run either .msi package it seems to think that there is a different version installed and will not proceed.

Has anyone else seen similar issues, or does anyone have any ideas that I may have overlooked?

Thanks in Advance.

[jayolsen]

Have you tried from your guest machine connecting to your virtual center server (net use, unc, whatever) and going to :\program files\vmware\vmware virtualcenter 2.0\ and running the vmwaretoolsupgrader.exe ?

[m_d_sella]

Thank you for the reply, I hadn't tried that yet.

Unfortunately, I get the same result. It continues to display the error message that it cannot remove the old version of VMware Tools.

This afternoon I migrated a few more machines and all of them seemed to work fine, so I am now at about a 75% success rate.

[bggb29]

I had the same issue where it was looking for old msi and the number 1 was the msi it was looking for. I found a post that mentioned deleting a registry key. I did that and installed the new version no problem. I will try to find that post

[bggb29 · Accepted solution]

try this thread

http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=615905

[m_d_sella]

Thank you very much for the link to that post. Deleted the registry key as recommended and all is well.