Upgraded 3 Dell PowerEdge servers from 6.0 to 6.5 fine. VMware tools upgrade fails on all vm's

[Parschauer]

I have three Dell Poweredge Servers, two in a cluster and a third one for Veeam and other stuff.  Each one upgraded fine from 6.0 to 6.5. All is up and running great except of course in vCenter all of the vm's show vmware tools is out of date. The auto-upgrade and the manual upgrades all fail (Windows and linux).  I then downloaded the .exe file from the vmware website and it fails the same way. When I tried the auto-upgrade route first it errored out with a bunch of files not found. I used the Dell custom .ISO image from Dell's website to do the 6 to 6.5 upgrade.

- Gary

Edit   4pm -  Update:  I had to manually download the linuxGlibc25 files from myvmware and upload them to the "locker" on each host. I was then able to manually upgrade vmware tools on the linux vm's. I then downloaded the 10.1.7 vmware tools for Windows and manually installed it in each Windows vm, except for one. So everything is now updated except one Windows 2012 R2 terminal server.  I can't find any log files or event logs that give a clue. Anyone?

[virtualDD · Accepted solution]

It seems the vmware tools in your dell custom image are corrupt.

Did you know that you can download the vmware tools, put them on a shared datastore and point all the hosts' locker configuration to that datastore? It gives you control over which vmware tools version is determined to be "up to date" and you can be sure that the downloaded vmware tools are not corrupt by doing the md5 checksum. if you're interested in how to achieve this let me know (or ask google^^)

In regards to your windows 2012 terminal server. I had similar issues in the past and my only solution was to remove vmware tools completely (reboot) and then reinstall them.