VMware Physical Disk Helper Service

[jasonboche]

At what point does the VMware Tools installation decide to install the VMware Physical Disk Helper Service? I'm not seeing this service on most of the VMs in my environment, however, I'm seeing that it is installed on a Windows XP Professional VM that was once a physical machine and it was subsequently P2Vd. VMware Tools insists on installing this service on the P2Vd VM and I'm trying to prevent it from installing because the service fails to start when not installing the Toolbox component of the VMware Tools installation.

Thank you,

Jas

Jason Boche

VMware Communities User Moderator

Minneapolis Area VMware User Group Leader

[wamatha]

Ever got an answer for this? I have couple of Windows 2008 VM's that don't install this service at all.

Any idea how to resolve this?

Joseph

[DanM]

Bumping a six year-old thread -- I can't find documentation anywhere about this service!

I'm seeing an issue with Virtual Machine backups where if CBT is used the VM will freeze permanently during the snapshot commit stage.  So I disabled this service on the VM in question and my Initial backup and subsequent CBT-assisted backups are completing without a problem. 

This issue ONLY appears to be happening on a handful VM's I P2V'd about 5 years ago - they all have this service installed via VMware tools.

Regards,

D.

[borgesh]

Now bumping what appears to be a 12 year old message with no answer. I am updating a few Windows 8.1 VMWare Fusion VMs to Windows 10 - When repairing the VM Tools I - at each upgrade instance when repairing the VM Tools -get the message that "Setup failed to install the Physical Disk Helper driver automatically. This driver will have to be installed manually." The repair session then finishes successfully. I have not been able to find any information about this driver: how to install it manually; what does it do; do we need it at all or can we just ignore it - some authoritative reply from the VMware team would be nice...