ms august updates and vmtools auto update

[Marcel_S]

Beware of the new august microsoft updates and vm's with vmtools auto update enabled...

I installed today on four 2019 server the newest microsoft patches, rebooted them and then the "disaster" begun...

It seems these patches make a second reboot, I guess at the same time vmtools are uninstalling and then left in a uncostinant state...

After all vsphere says no vmtools installed, if you try to install from hand it fails...

Solution, stop remaining vmtools services

ren "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools" "VMware Tools.old"

ren "C:\ProgramData\VMware" "VMware.old"

reboot server and install tools from hand.

Good luck for those who let ms updates install automatically and habe vmtools auto update on...

[Daniel Moses]

This has been a rare, but not uncommon occurrence to me for years.  Something about the timing sometimes hiccups like that.  Of my 400+ VM's I've probably had about a dozen this year have that issue.  So far, the only thing I've had to do is stop the remaining services, manually reinstall tools, then reboot the server.  I've not had to rename any folders in the past.

[R_Brightwell]

We've been doing auto updates of tools for a while and only rarely/occasionally ran into issues, but last weekend's patching seemed to trigger the problem on many of our VMs.  Depending on the timing, it uninstalled the tools altogether, or left it in an inconsistent state.  Depending on the severity, the fix was to re-install the tools from the mounted disk, or uninstall the tools completely and re-install from the mounted disk.  For this reason, we only have the auto update turned on for non-production VMs.

[Allan Solomon Mejia]

This looks like a timing/race-condition issue when Windows Update reboots while VMware Tools is mid-upgrade. For production VMs, I'd avoid overlapping OS patching and automatic Tools upgrades. I'll schedule them separately to reduce the risk of leaving VMware Tools in an inconsistent state.

[LordLeonidas]

Perhaps this:

Error: VMware Tools installation fails with "Setup wizard ended prematurely" due to VGAuth log permissions