VMWare Tools and never powered on templates

[ender3989]

I'm working on a workflow that involves cutting a virtual machine in VirtualBox on my local machine, using OVFTool to convert it to a VMX / VMDK and uploading those to a datastore. I upload the VMX as a template, and register it once it's uploaded.  This works great, except for when it thinks that VMware tools isn't installed, when makes it so I can't use guest customizations.  When I'm cutting the VM I install open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-deploypkg. If I clone a vm from the template, power it up, shut it down and turn THAT into a template, it sees the vmware tools version correctly (and I can use guest customizations). Does anyone have any idea if there's something I can set in the vmx file or something during the registration process that can cut out the dance of clone, boot, poweroff, mark as template?

Thanks!

[nflynn]

I am having the exact same problem.

It appears the information about vmware tools is stored in the header for the .vmdk file.

So far I have spent hours/days trying to build a VM outside of vCenter and import it with vMware reporting the tools installed - no luck so far.

I am building the VM's on Vmware Player on Linux using the officiial tools but the result is when importing the resulting OVF in to vSphere it says no tools installed until first bot, which breaks the template automation I have :smileysad:

[mikemarseglia]

I solved this problem by downloading the linux.iso from the ESXi host and running the installer.  This is needed for CentOS 6.x.

This KB tells you where tools lives on ESXi, so you can download it: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004820

Mount the iso, unpack the tar/gzipped file to a temp directory.

Then you can either run vmware-install.pl -d, for a silent, default install or follow William Lam's article for customizing the install. Automating silent installation of VMware Tools on Linux w/Automatic Kernel Modules | virtuallyGhetto

CentOS 7.x can use open-vm-tools and this is detected by ESXi 6.0 just fine.