There are a number of ways to check the version of a VMware Tools installation within a Linux Virtual Machine, as stated by the VMware KB on “Verifying a VMware Tools build version”. However, they don’t all work if you are running a mixed environment with some older hosts and older versions of VMware Tools.
You may want to verify if VMware Tools is even running. New versions are running as “/usr/sbin/vmtoolsd” whereas old versions run as “vmware-guestd”.
# ps faux | grep -P '(vmware|vmtoolsd)' | grep -v grep root 2714 0.0 0.0 17560 812 ? Ss 2011 19:26 /usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmware-guestd --background /var/run/vmware-guestd.pid
# ps faux | grep -P '(vmware|vmtoolsd)' | grep -v grep root 11488 0.0 0.1 46644 2900 ? S 10:02 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd
To find the version of your VMware Tools, your first try should be the following at the command line.
# /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd -v 8.3.12.8191 (build-493255)
If you are getting the error that the binary does not exist, you’re running a fairly old version of VMware Tools.
# /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd -bash: /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd: No such file or directory
If that’s the case, you can try to check the version via the config-tools script.
# grep buildNr /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl my $buildNr; $buildNr = '4.0.0 build-236512'; return remove_whitespaces($buildNr);
That will show you the build number of your ESX(i) host, and not directly the VMware Tools version. If that still shows 4.0, you can already upgrade to ESX(i) 4.1 which has an updated version of VMware Tools available that features the “vmware-toolbox-cmd” command.
An alternative without grepping the config-tools is invoking the tool and searching the output.
# vmware-config-tools.pl -h 2>&1 | grep "VMware Tools" VMware Tools 4.0.0 build-236512 for configurator.
On some VMware Tools installations, you can also find your version using the following:
# vmware-toolbox --version
However, I could not find a host within my reach to demonstrate the output.