VMware mouse and video drivers not working after upgrading to SLE12.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

VMware mouse and video drivers might stop working after you upgrade from SLE10 or SLE11 serials to SLE12. After upgrading, the VMware mouse might stop moving freely and video driver might fallback to mode setting instead of optimized VMware driver.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

VMware does not recommend upgrades of Guest OS between major OS releases. Such as Windows 7 to Windows 8 or RHEL 5.x to RHEL 6.0. VMware recommends installing a new major release on a new virtual machine. For more information, see VMware support for guest operating system upgrade  for reference.

Follow these steps in case you want to perform a migration:

1. Uninstall the Vmware Tools before starting the migration, run the following VMware uninstall command:
   /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl
2. Perform the migration.
3. Use the open-vm-tools which are installed by default.