Installing VMware tools on the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS is a tad different than on 5.x and 6.x distributions. The main difference is that it’s now recommended to install Open-VM-Tools on both operating systems rather than anything else. You can read more about open-vm-tools on the VMware KB article here.
Do note that no additional repository is no longer needed!
yum -y install open-vm-tools
to start open-vm-tools just type the following command:
systemctl start vmtoolsd.service
As a side now, the new iteration also supports Paravirtual SCSI driver and VMXNet3 out of the box without installing open-vm-tools and thus is really recommended to use them for performance gain.
To enable open-vm-tools at startup, use the following command:
systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
Why in the world is this basic info not included in any official documents?! I’ve been tearing my hair (what little I have left) out trying to figure out how to actually use the open-vm-tools package! Thank you for the info!
Unfortunately this doesn’t work on Ubuntu 16.04, which uses systemctl but open-vm-tools fails to use the correct process. :(
Marc, I was wondering the same thing! They all just say “install open-vm-tools” but don’t tell you how to start the service or anything. Thanks for this article, works flawless on CentOS 7.4.