Enabling VMware Shared Folders in the UI fails silently for RHEL 7.4 or earlier guests

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:

1. Turn off PrivateTmp for vmtoolsd service by commenting out the line PrivateTmp=true in the file /usr/lib/system/vmtoolsd.service
2. Restart the service.
3. Disable and re-enable the Shared Folders from the UI.