After VMware Tools is installed on virtual machines running recent Linux distributions, such as RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 and Ubuntu 6.1 & higher version, the following symptoms may appear:
VMware vSphere ESXi
This issue occurs because the /sbin/init program (init) from the sysvinit package has been replaced with Upstart in recent Linux distributions.
For more information on Upstart, refer to the RedHat Customer Portal.
Depending on how VMware Tools was installed and configured on the system, the init script may be found in one of two locations.
In one case, the /etc/init directory contains the configuration files. The vmware-tools script is in the /etc/init/vmware-tools.conf file. The command overview is in init(8) and the syntax is described in init(5).
In the other case, the vmware-tools script is in /etc/init/vmware-tools-services.sh, which calls the script /etc/vmware-tools/init/vmware-tools-services.
/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start
/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh stop
/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh restart
/etc/init.d/open-vm-tools status
/etc/init.d/open-vm-tools stop
/etc/init.d/open-vm-tools restart
/etc/init.d/open-vm-tools start
status vmware-tools
/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start
vmware-config-tools.pl -d -p --clobber-kernel-modules='vmci,vsock,vmmemctl,vmxnet3,pcnet32,pvscsi'