Shared folder does not work with default install of VMware Tools on Ubuntu 15.04 with open-vm-tools

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

While installing VMware Tools in an Ubuntu 15.04 virtual machine which has open-vm-tools installed, the user might experience the following:

VMware Tools installer detects the presence of the mount.vmhgfs binary installed by the open-vm-tools package and causes a prompt to be issued to the user asking whether they want to replace this binary with one from the VMware tools install package.

The default answer for this prompt is NO which indicates not replace mount.vmhgfs binary with the one from VMware Tools install package. If you choose the default NO and later choose YES to install the VMware Shared Folders feature, then the Shared Folder will not work when you enable it in VM Settings.

Note: This issue is applicable only to VMware Tools version lower than 10.1.0.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Resolution

For the VMware Shared Folders feature, both mount.vmhgfs binary and the vmhgfs kernel should be installed from the VMware Tools installer or neither should be installed. These components are tightly integrated and installing different versions can result in mount issues while using the Shared Folders feature.

If the user wants to install the VMware Shared Folders components to use the file sharing feature, then choose YES to replace the mount.vmhgfs binary, and choose YES to install VMware Shared Folders feature.

If the user does not intend to install the VMware Shared Folders feature,then choose NO to not replace the mount.vmhgfs binary and choose NO to not install VMware Shared Folders feature.