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I have an ESXi server running. I created a VM on the server and installed a new ESXi on the VM. Now I would like to install VMware Tools for the nested ESXi. How to do it? On ESXi, there is no perl, mount, umount, lsmod, depmod, rmmod, modprobe. And its available space is limited for the system area.

uname -s ===> VMKernel

I copied the perl 5.8.8 binaries to a datastore attached to the ESXi on the VM. And it can execute perl script and also the installer script of VMware Tools. I also prepared gcc but there is no kernel header for the ESXi. I am not sure if any kernel headers of SLES, RHEL, Ubuntu, or Centos works for building the VMware Tools kernel modules. Any idea or suggestion is welcome. Thanks.

Doz Parp
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The VMware Tools are supported (and therefore the installer is guaranteed to run) only on certain operating systems, ESXi is not one of those operating systems. You can't use the Linux version of VMware tools without some work (or maybe not at all, I haven't tried) because ESX is not Linux.

ESX runs the vmkernel, not the Linux kernel. VMKernel does have some Linux kernel compatibility through the vmklinux kernel module on ESX, but it's a subset. AFAIK, you can't just drop in a pre-compiled kernel module, but it is possible to rebuild Linux kernel modules for VMkernel. Some drivers will require changes to their source code for this work.

IIRC, ESX provides a Linux userworld for the service console. It's not a full Linux install like RedHat or anything. It has limited binaries and only supports a limited set of the posix API.

So, you're unlikely to get the Linux VMware tools to "just work" with the installer. It may be possible to get individual kernel modules working, not sure. Why do you want the tools running in the ESX guest? What feature do you want?

kbyrd
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  • I am afraid that ESXi is a kind of Linux. You can try to type "uname -a" and there will be "GNU/Linux" on ESXi. Moreover, The kernel headers of Linux 3.0 may be used as ESXi server kernel headers. However, DKMS should be installed on the ESXi first. – Doz Parp Nov 09 '13 at 14:57
  • @DozParp: Your comment spurred me to provide a more complete answer. Hopefully this isn't already out of date. – kbyrd Nov 09 '13 at 18:04