How do I make sure VMware Tools is installed and running?

Solution 1:

On a healthy system, you should see the vmtoolsd daemon:

[root@xt ~]# ps aux | grep vm
root       381  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Jun23   0:00 [vmw_pvscsi_wq_2]
root      1319  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Jun23   0:18 [vmmemctl]
root      2315  0.0  0.0  69540  1960 ?        Sl   Jun23  14:43 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd

Please also see: How to detect, in the guest operating system, if the vmware tools are out of date?

One of the interesting options for VMware installations now is the use of the VMware Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) instead of managing the guest tools through the vSphere console.

This enables tools management independent of your vSphere version, and allows distribution through your operating system's native package manager.