VMware Tools will not start when /tmp is full in a Linux VM while open-vm-tools is not affected

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

VMware Tools will not start when /tmp is full in a Linux VM while open-vm-tools is not affected

Environment

For a RHEL Linux VM after a reboot the contents of /tmp will persist.

The user configured /tmp to be mounted on a separate disk partition. When /tmp is full and user rebooted the VM, contents of /tmp persisted so /tmp was still full. Then the user observed that VMware Tools was not running.

Cause

VMware Tools can not be started when /tmp is full as it needs to put something to /tmp, for instance, it will put appLoader logs to /tmp/vmware-root, such as vmware-12345.log, vmware-apploader-678.log.

Open-vm-tools does not work as that way.

Resolution

1. Set up a monitoring system to monitor the usage of /tmp and prevent it from becoming full.

2. Use open-vm-tools instead of VMware Tools.

Additional Information

How to mount /tmp to a separate disk partition?

mkdir /mnt/tmp_partition     # /mnt/tmp_partition can be replaced by other location
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX    # sdX is the entire disk partition, for instance, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc. You can also use /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc2.....
mount /dev/sdX /mnt/tmp_partition

service systemd-tmpfiles stop
rsync -avz /tmp/ /mnt/tmp_partition

# put below line to /etc/fstab
/dev/sdX    /tmp    ext4    defaults,noexec,nodev,nosuid    0 0

then reboot it.