Ports are exhausted on Guest VM after a few days when using VMware Tools 10.2.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• VMware Tools 10.2.0 version is not recommended by VMware due to below possible issues:

 

• Guest virtual machine ports are exhausted after a few days
• Networking is lost
• Network connections cannot be made

• 10.2.0 is End of Life/ End of Availability.
• All customers should install/upgrade to VMware Tools greater than 10.2.0

Resolution

1. Upgrade to a newer version of VMware Tools (versions after 10.2.0).

Note:  VMware CAF Management Agent service (ManagementAgentHost.exe) is stopped by default in VMware Tools > 10.2.0. Do not enable VMware CAF Management Agent service manually.
 
2. If using VMware Tools 10.2.0

On Windows VM:

Manually stop VMware CAF Management Agent service (ManagementAgentHost.exe) and change the start type to manual after installing or upgrading to VMware Tools 10.2.0. The script that is attached in this article can be used to stop VMware CAF Management Agent service within multiple VMs.
 
On Linux VM:

a) If virtual machine needs to install or upgrade to VMware Tools 10.2.0, use this command to upgrade VMware Tools:

/vmware-install.pl -d ENABLE_CAF=no

b) If virtual machines are already working using VMware Tools 10.2.0,

I. Stop vmtools by running the command:

stop vmware-tools

OR

/etc/init.d/vmware-tools stop

II. Run this command:

vmware-config-tools.pl ENABLE_CAF=no

Additional Information

The latest VMware Tools build associated to ESXi version can be found here.