Enabling VMware Shared Folders in the UI fails silently for RHEL 7.4 or earlier guests
book
Article ID: 329058
calendar_today
Updated On:
Products
VMware Desktop Hypervisor
Issue/Introduction
Symptoms: Enabling VMware Shared Folders in the VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion UI completes successfully without any error dialog box but no HGFS shares are mounted in RHEL 7.4 or earlier guests.
Note: This behavior is seen with open-vm-tools on RHEL versions 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4.
Cause
RHEL 7.x guests with open-vm-tools often configure vmtoolsd service with PrivateTmp=true setting, this leads to vmtoolsd service in the guest running with its private namespace for mount operations. Therefore, VMware Shared Folders get mounted within private namespace of vmtoolsd instead of globally accessible mount point /mnt/hgfs inside the guest.
Resolution
This issue is resolved in RHEL 7.5.
Workaround: Perform these steps to workaround this issue:
Turn off PrivateTmp for vmtoolsd service by commenting out the line PrivateTmp=true in the file /usr/lib/system/vmtoolsd.service
Restart the service.
Disable and re-enable the Shared Folders from the UI.