Install VMware tools using Microsoft Intune possible?

[ONagy]

Hi,

I am wondering if someone at VMware, already thought of making VMware Tools directly available in the MS Store, or alternatively offer a single-MSI package for an upload to Microsoft Intune MDM solution.

Let me explain the business need : we would like to Intune to manage our desktop PCs, whether they are physical or virtual. Intune can push softwares to these Intune-enrolled machines, either because they are available in the MS public Store, or when the company IT admin uploads an MSI file to Intune.

This VMware technote explains how to extract the drivers from the main setup64.exe file. An MSI file is generated, but some subfolders containing the drivers and VMware advanced features (copy/paste,...) as well. Without these subfolders, the MSI won't install.

So my question : we can probably repackage these drivers and features in some way to build a custom MSI, but that is error-prone and inconvenient. Wouldn't be that smarter to have one single MSI file, that contains everything needed to install the VMware advanced features in an unattended way? Or even better offer the VM Tools directly in the MS Store, while latest VMware drivers would always be automatically pulled from Windows Update?

Thx,

Olivier

[ykzhang]

Hi Oliver,

Thanks for the suggestion.

Starting from VMTools 10.2, we intend to support something similar -- You could leverage SCCM to manage and push down VMTools related package. You could have use a VMTools 10.2 Beta version to have a try, see Guide to deploy VMware Tools beta using SCCM

Also starting from VMTools 10.2, we are in the progress of uploading VMTools related drivers to MS store so that those drivers could be fetched through windows update. PVSCSI is the pioneer driver for 10.2 and we are planning to "upstream" more into MS store for future release.

Hope those would meet your requirements and let us know if any suggestions.

BRYike

[ONagy]

Hi Ykzhang,

(Wow, didn't expected a so-quick answer on my question, so big thx!)

We already use SCCM internally to install VMware Tools, so this is working as expected since years. Thing is that we will need to slowly move away from SCCM, as per new Microsoft strategy to move their customers from SCCM to Intune cloud-only solution, as fast as possible.

So VMware drivers in MS driver store : big thumbs up :heart:, but the tools will still be missing (no drag/drop between host and guest, auto screen resize,...), so it would be up to the user to install them manually : if a single-MSI file could be available will all your VM tools in it (worst case : passing arguments to the MSI installer to install a subset of the tools should not be that hard...), that would allow your customers to upload the MSI to Intune for automatic VMtools deployment to any machine that is detected as a VM.

This brings the huge benefit for a user, to download himself the Win10 ISO from Microsoft website, directly use it to install the OS inside the VM, enroll the VM to Intune using his domain creds at OOBE phase, and VM drivers and tools will automatically be deployed using MS store/Intune.

If you ask why don't we use SCCM to perform the same : the Intune enrolled machines will most likely no longer be on-prem domain-joined, but only workplace-joined through Azure AD and ADFS.