Installing/Upgrading downloadable tools can fail on pre-6.5U2 ESXi hosts

Products

• VMware
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
After downloading the vmware tools vib 10.3.22 or 11.0.6 from customerconnect.vmware.com (VMTools Download Page), and installing it on a pre-6.5U2 ESXi host, you are not able to install/upgrade the VMTools service in VMs with it using the existing UI or VIM API.

You get this error message:
API state: failed, The required VMware Tools ISO image does not exist or is inaccessible.
Errors: No VMware Tools package is available. The VMware Tools package is not available for this guest operating system.
vix error code = 21000

Environment

VMware Tools 11.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Cause

The old signing key/cert for Tools ISO expired in December 2019, we have updated our product with a new key/cert pair for signing Tools ISO files.
However, the new cert does not exist in pre 6.5U2 ESXi hosts.

Resolution

There are 2 options to resolve this issue:

• Upgrade the ESXi hosts to version 6.5 U2 or later

OR

• Download the tools setup.exe from packages.vmware.com/tools/releases, copy to the guest OS and run the setup file within the guest.