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PhillyPhoto
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-17-2013 05:40 AM
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Disabling auto-install of tools

I upgraded to VMware Fusion 6 recently and it is interfereing with our VM creation process. I have it installed on Macs and we deploy Win7 VMs with a Task Sequence. Part of the process is to use a proprietary program to automatically install applications that are not part of the base image. What's happening with V6 of Fusion is that it sees the Win7 image deployed and starts to automatically try to install the VMware tools package. This breaks the install and althrough the image gets deployed not everything is installed or configured correctly. Some machines don't get machine certificates and can't connect to our VPN, the System Protection Configuration settings don't get set, the programs that were supposed to get installed automatically don't. We don't get the SCCM OSD deployment screen with the final result either. If you sit at the machine during the build you can sometimes catch it and cancel the install, but it's usually a 2-3 hour deployment and I'm not always next to every machine. I can't even kick off the install of our software manually after the fact until I completely remove the VMware tools. It will be sitting in the background and won't allow any other installs to go through. Sometimes I'll get an "Interactive Services" popup and will have to finish the install through that. The only thing I could find was go to the VMware Fusion menu > Preferences and uncheck "Automatically check for updates" but that hasn't made a difference. I'm assuming that's updates for the actuall program and not the VMware tools however, as I haven't found anything under Virtual Machine > Settings. I had no problem with using the Task Sequence in V5 and I'm not sure why this was changed in V6. I would rather add a line to the .VMX file for each one instead of having to clean each one up afterwards if that's what it takes.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal
‎12-17-2013 05:56 AM
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In the .vmx configuration file replace tools.upgrade.policy = "upgradeAtPowerCycle" with: tools.upgrade.policy = "manual"

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal
‎12-17-2013 05:56 AM
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In the .vmx configuration file replace tools.upgrade.policy = "upgradeAtPowerCycle" with: tools.upgrade.policy = "manual"

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pfruth
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎04-29-2016 09:13 PM
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Sorry to resurrect this old thread.  But, I thought my experience with a recent update to Fusion 8.1.1 would be relevant to others.


I set tools.upgrade.policy = "manual" on one of my virtual machines.  Upon starting the VM, I received an error message stating that ""manual"" is an invalid value for "tools.upgrade.policy" and that it is being changed to "useGlobal".


However, setting tools.upgrade.policy = manual (notice no quotes) DOES work as expected.

Does anyone know if there's any documentation describing all the possible settings/values in a .vmx file?  I've looked in the latest VMware Fusion V8 User Guide [1] and I don't see anything there.

[1] - http://pubs.vmware.com/fusion-8/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/fusion-8-user-guide.pdf

EDIT: After consulting with a very helpful technician in VMware support, I've learned that a smart quote is not the same as a regular quote.

It seems that I made a rookie mistake.  Editing the .vmx file with MacOS's TextEdit app, I had mistakenly left the "smart quotes" feature turned on.

After turning "smart quotes" off, setting tools.upgrade.policy = "manual" works as it should.

<head hanging in shame>

     So, never mind.  Hopefully this will serve as an example for others.

</head hanging in shame>

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