Difficulty installing VMWare Tools on RHEL 6.9

Latest response

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this issue as I just got off the phone with VMWare Support and they are thinking that something has changed with Red Hat, RHEL6 and/or the kernel which is causing issues on how we install VMWare Tools.

I have a RHEL 6.9 x86_64 VM and I just installed a new kernel:

[cmmiller@hostname ~]$ uname -a
Linux (FQDN removed) 2.6.32-696.20.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 12 15:07:59 EST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[cmmiller@hostname ~]$

Any time this happens, I uninstall VMWare Tools and re-install VMWare Tools, make sure to select the option with the kernel, and all is well.

However this time when following the same steps, from vCenter, I'm getting either an error message from the Summary Tab under that RHEL Guest. Either getting "VMWare Tools is not installed" or "VMWare Tools is not running."

I'm falling back to a snapshot to fix this, however I also tried to not remove VMWare Tools after upgrading to this kernel and VMWare Tools continued to run with no issues, even after rebooting and booting into a new kernel.

I'm also having issues where I go to install VMWare Tools from our ESXi servers and same issue. However if I grab VMWare Tools from VMWare's website, which maybe a few versions ahead, then it installs with no issues.

For the heck of it, I noticed that Red Hat has packages for open-vm-tools for RHEL v6.9. I may just go this route, however will this have any issues with VMWare vSphere 6.0.0? Will I still have the same functionality of using NIC drivers of vmxnet3? Or any others cons/pros that I may not have thought about?

thanks again

Responses

I've opened a ticket with on this issue with Red Hat GSS. This is part of the response that I've got:

There are multiples modules got included in the latest kernel of RHEL-6, but again those are written by Red Hat, its taken from upstream and included in the latest kernel of RHEL 6 and 7 to make the functionality more smother.

I'm wondering on this response if they are referring to a change log for the RHEL kernel. If this is the case, then were can I find this information? Are they referring to the Product Documentation for RHEL6?

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/?version=6

There are release notes for technical and release notes and I looked at the tech notes for the kernel under the technical documentation, however there wasn't any information.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/6.9_technical_notes/bug_fixes_kernel

I honestly don't know much about change logs when it comes to Linux and/or RHEL. If anyone can provide a little more info on how to learn this or get a better understanding, I'm all ears.

thanks

rpm -q kernel --changelog shows the changelog of the kernel rpm.

Thanks for passing that command along.

Looks like that is quite a bit of information and it might not be matching the kernel log, as I'm currently running the following kernel:

[root@server tmp]# uname -a
Linux server 2.6.32-696.23.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Sat Feb 10 11:10:31 EST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@server tmp]#

This was the first entry from the kernel log and it doesn't match the current running kernel, but does match one of the kernel under /boot

* Thu Dec 28 2017 Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com> [2.6.32-696.18.7.el6]
- [x86] spec_ctrl: svm: spec_ctrl at vmexit needs per-cpu areas functional (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] spec_ctrl: Eliminate redundnat FEATURE Not Present messages (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] spec_ctrl: enable IBRS and stuff_RSB before calling NMI C code (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] spec_ctrl: skip CAP_SYS_PTRACE check to skip audit (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] spec_ctrl: disable ibrs while in intel_idle() (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] spec_ctrl: skip IBRS/CR3 restore when paranoid exception returns to userland (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- Revert "x86/entry: Use retpoline for syscall's indirect calls" (Waiman Long) [1519797 1519796] {CVE-2017-5715}
- [x86] mm/dump_pagetables: Allow dumping current pagetables (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/dump_pagetables: Add a pgd argument to walk_pgd_level() (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/dump_pagetables: Add page table directory (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] entry: Remove unneeded nmi_userspace code (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] entry: Fix nmi exit code with CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/kaiser: init_tss is supposed to go in the PAGE_ALIGNED per-cpu section (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/kaiser: Clear kdump pgd page to prevent incorrect behavior (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/kaiser: consider the init_mm.pgd a kaiser pgd (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
- [x86] mm/kaiser: convert userland visible "kpti" name to "pti" (Waiman Long) [1519799 1519802] {CVE-2017-5754}
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