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pearlyshells
Contributor
Contributor

VMtools updates always requires VMs to be rebooted.....

I've got over 100 VMs and I know other companies have tons more.....it seems everytime we have an ESX update (and, in the case of this last round of updates with Update Manager) VMTools gets updated and that means all my VMs have to be rebooted. Is there a way to submit a Feature Request to somehow make it so that VMtools does not require VM reboots ? I am new to VMware and maybe I'm missing something but I certainly dislike continually rebooting my VMs. This is the 3rd time in less than a year.

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bradley4681
Expert
Expert

you don't always have to update the tools but it's recommended. you can also do an automatic upgrade of the tools and switches to supress the reboot, you'll still need to reboot at some point for all the upgrades to take affect but you'll be able to schedule it. I know in future versions VMware is working on the ability to apply any patch or update without a reboot.

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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Cheers! If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".
pearlyshells
Contributor
Contributor

thanks for the information. It's encouraging to know VMware has plans to make the situation of reboots better. I'll try to suppress the reboots in the future. Didn't know that "I did not have to update VMtools"...just that it was a recommendation. This, too, is good news. I see that the note for VMtools in VC under each VM turns to "out of date" each time I've patched it and felt it HAD to be updated. Good to know I did not have to.

Thanks again

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Bart_Verbruggen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You can also script the VMware tools install.

The only thing that you need to do is to extract the VMware tools once (when it is mounted on the disk-drive) and copy the.msi and other files to a shared folder.

Than you can execute the command "VMware Tools.msi ALLUSERS=TRUE REBOOT=SUPRESS /QB-"

This installs the VMware tools without a reboot.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks! Bart
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Bart_Verbruggen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You can also script the VMware tools installation.

To do this you must one time extract the .msi from the disk drive when the VMware tools are installed to a shared folder.

Than you can script the install of the VMware tools like this:

VMware Tools.msi ALLUSERS=TRUE REBOOT=SUPRESS /QB-

This will install the VMware tools without a immediate reboot.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks! Bart