VMware Tools 11.3.0 Release Notes

Introduction

VMware Tools | 17 JUN 2021 | 18090558

Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

What's New

When GlobalConf feature-related settings are modified in the VMware Tools Configuration file (

tools.conf

), the VMware Tools System service (vmsvc) does not need to restart. For more information about the GlobalConf feature, see Distribute VMware Tools Configuration at Scale for Windows.

A new command line option "

/pv

" is added in the VMware Tools setup.exe to show the package versions it will install.

When a VMware Tools component is installed or upgraded, you see a notification to restart the system. You can activate or deactivate this notification display in the Windows VM system settings.

This feature is available only on VMware Remote Console and Web Console.

The VMCI driver is installed by default as part of the VMware Tools installation. If you have deactivated the VMCI driver in the setup settings during a previous installation, VMware Tools automatically re-installs the VMCI driver during the upgrade.

You cannot deactivate the VMCI driver because the VMware Tools System service depends on it.

Earlier Releases of VMware Tools

For earlier releases of VMware Tools, see the VMware Tools Documentation page.

Before You Begin

VMware Tools 11.3.0 supports the following guest operating systems:

windows.iso

supports Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later.

Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package is a prerequisite for installing VMware Tools for Windows 11.3.0 and ships with the VMware Tools 11.3.0 download package. While preparing a target Windows guest for installation, VMware Tools runs the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package installer which checks for a more recent version on the target guest. If the target guest has a more recent version already present, the package does not install.

The prerequisite version for a 32-bit Windows guest is Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x86) version 14.27.29016.0. The prerequisite versions for a 64-bit Windows guest are Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x86) version 14.27.29016.0 and Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable (x64) version 14.27.29016.0.

VMware Tools 11.3.0 depends on and ships Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, 2017, and 2019. While preparing the system for VMware Tools 11.3.0 installation, Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, 2017, and 2019 is installed on the system as a prerequisite. For Windows versions that do not meet the prerequisites installing or upgrading to VMware Tools 11.3.0 is not supported. You must use VMware Tools 10.2.x or later until you can patch or update Windows OS to meet the prerequisites for VMware Tools 11.3.0. Refer to Microsoft's update KB2977003 for the latest supported Visual C++ downloads.

Windows OS level prerequisites

Windows Server 2019

Windows Server 2016

Windows 10

Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft update. For more information, see KB2919355.

Windows 8.1 with Microsoft update. For more information, see KB2919355.

Windows Server 2012

Windows 8

Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) with Microsoft's update. For more information, see KB4474419.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) with Microsoft's update. For more information, see KB4474419.

darwin.iso

supports Mac OS X versions 10.11 and later.

For more information about

linux.iso

, see VMware Tools 10.3.23 Release Notes.

For more information about

solaris.iso

, see VMware Tools 10.3.10 Release Notes.

VMware Tools ISO images are frozen for some end of life guest operating systems. Some ISO images are not included with ESXi in the

tools-light

VIB. For more information, see the VMware Tools Documentation page. All VMware Tools ISO images are available for download from https://support.broadcom.com.

VMware Tools for Windows
: 32-bit and 64-bit installer executable (.exe) files are available for download. These files are provided for easier access and installation of VMware Tools in Windows guest operating systems.

For the resolution on incompatibility and general guidelines, while upgrading ESXi hosts to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or ESXi 6.0 Update 1 or later, and using earlier versions of Horizon View Agent, refer to the knowledge base articles:

Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View Agent 5.3.5 or earlier hosted on ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or later fails with a black screen.

Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View Agent 6.0.x or 6.1.x hosted on ESXi 5.5 Update 3b or later fails with a black screen.

Connecting to View desktops with Horizon View Agent 6.1.x hosted on ESXi 6.0 Update 1 or later fails with a black screen.

Internationalization

VMware Tools 11.3.0 is available in the following languages:

English

French

German

Spanish

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

Product Support Notice

The Windows pre-Vista iso image for VMWare Tools is no longer packaged with ESXi. The Windows pre-Vista iso image is available for download by users who require it. For download information, see the Product Download page.

End of Feature Support Notice

Balloon driver has been removed from MacOs VMware Tools 11.1.0.

VMware Tools 10.3.5 release supports the tar tools (

linux.iso

) and OSPs. Releases after VMware Tools 10.3.5 include only critical and security fixes and do not support new features in VMware Tools tar tools and OSPs. Use open-vm-tools for those operating systems that support open-vm-tools. For more information on different types of VMware Tools, see https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/02/understanding-the-three-types-of-vm-tools.html.

Compatibility Notes

Starting with VMware Tools version 10.2.0, Perl script-based VMware Tools installation for FreeBSD has been discontinued. FreeBSD systems are supported only through the open-vm-tools packages directly available from FreeBSD package repositories. FreeBSD packages for open-vm-tools 10.1.0 and later are available from FreeBSD package repositories.

Guest Operating System Customization Support

The Guest OS Customization Support Matrix provides details about the guest operating systems supported for customization.

Interoperability Matrix

The VMware Product Interoperability Matrix provides details about the compatibility of current and earlier versions of VMware Products.

Installation and Upgrades for this release

VMware Tools can be downloaded from the Product Download page.

The steps to install VMware Tools vary depending on your VMware product and the guest operating system you have installed. For general steps to install VMware Tools in most VMware products, see General VMware Tools installation instructions (1014294). To set up productLocker to point to the shared datastore, see KB 2004018.

This release provides packages to upgrade VMware Tools 11.2.5 or later deployments using GuestStore.

For instructions to install, upgrade, and configure VMware Tools, see the VMware Tools Documentation page.

Windows Guest Drivers Installed by VMware Tools

VMware Tools 11.3.0 supports the following driver versions on a Windows guest operating system.

Drivers	VMware Tools 11.3.0
Hardware Drivers
efifwfromhost.bin	1.0.0.0
pvscsi.sys	For Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 Release 2 - 1.3.15.0 For Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Release 2, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019 - 1.3.17.0
vmaudio.sys	5.10.0.3506
vmci.sys	9.8.16.0
vmmouse.sys	12.5.10.0
vmusbmouse.sys	12.5.10.0
vmxnet2.sys	2.2.0.0
vmxnet3.sys	1.9.2.0
wddm.sys	8.17.03.0001
Software Drivers
giappdef.sys	2.3.1.0
glgxi.sys	2.3.0.0
vmhgfs.sys	11.0.42.0
vmmemctl.sys	7.5.5.0
vmrawdsk.sys	1.1.5.0
vnetWFP.sys	11.3.0.0
vsepflt.sys	11.3.0.0
vsock.sys	9.8.17.0
Security DLL
vmwsu.dll	2.5.0.0

Resolved Issues

VMware Tools for Windows update addresses a denial-of-service vulnerability

VMware Tools for Windows contains a denial-of-service vulnerability in the VM3DMP driver. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2021-21997 to this issue. For more information, see VMSA-2021-0011.

This issue was resolved in this release.

VMware Tools does not report "per second rate" type of guest stats for Linux VMs with some non en-US locales

For Linux VMs with some non en-US locales (such as es_ES locale), VMware Tools does not report "per second rate" type of guest stats on vROps. For example, Guest|Page In Rate per second.

This issue was resolved in the 11.3.0 open-vm-tools release.

Workaround:

Before getting the fix in open-vm-tools, the workaround is:

Add

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in vmtoolsd

daemon start script.

Unexpected warning log messages in the VMware Tools log file

Starting with VMware Tools 11.2.5 and later, the VMware Tools system service log (by default

'C:\Windows\Temp\vmware-vmsvc-SYSTEM.log'

) repeatedly shows the following warning message:

[warning] [vmsvc] ToolsNotifyGetKeyValue: Cannot open the registry \Software\VMware, Inc.\NeedReboot: 2

This issue is resolved in this release.

Application hangs during guest shutdown of a VM

Threads in

vsepflt

might cause a deadlock due to the oplock being overridden. This results in hanging during a guest shutdown.

This issue is resolved in this release.

Known Issues

VMware Tools Issues

Installing or upgrading versions earlier than VMware Tools 10.3.0 to VMware Tools 11.1.x might take longer and Windows OS might need a restart

The installation process might appear to be in progress and displays a message similar to the following:

"Preparing 'VMware Tools' for installation..."

During this process, you might be prompted to restart the operating system.

Workaround:

For more information, see KB 55798.

VMware Tools upgrade fails on Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 without SHA-2 code signing support

Microsoft has changed Windows driver signing to use SHA-2 algorithm exclusively starting December 3, 2019. Hence, legacy Windows systems without SHA-2 code signing support fail driver signature verification.

Workaround:

For more information, see KB 78708.

AppDefense driver glxgi logs an error in the event viewer

AppDefense driver

glxgi

logs an error in the event viewer similar to the following:

"

The glxgi service failed to start due to the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.

"

The events are observed when Guest Integrity is disabled.

Workaround:

These events do not impact the system and are safe to ignore.

After upgrading to a new VMware Tools version with installer parameter to remove the NetworkIntrospection feature, earlier version of vnetflt or vnetWFP driver service still runs

After the upgrade, the NetworkIntrospection feature is not present in the system's VMware Tools MSI database, but the feature's vnetflt or vnetWFP driver service still exists.

Workaround:

For more information, see KB 78016.

VMware Tools Issues in VMware Workstation or Fusion

Drag functionality fails to work in Ubuntu.

Drag functionality fails to work in Ubuntu 16.04.4 32-bit virtual machine installed using easy install. Also, failure of copy and paste functionality is observed in the same system.

Add the

modprobe.blacklist=vmwgfx

linux kernel boot option.

To gain access to larger resolutions, remove

svga.guestBackedPrimaryAware = "TRUE"

option from the VMX file.

Shared Folders mount is unavailable on Linux VM.

If the Shared Folders
feature is enabled on a Linux VM while it is powered off, shared folders mount is not available on restart.

Note: This issue is applicable for VMware Tools running on Workstation and Fusion.

Shared Folders
feature from the interface.For resolving the issue permanently, edit /etc/fstab
and add an entry to mount the Shared Folders automatically on boot.

For example, add the line:

vmhgfs-fuse /mnt/hgfs fuse defaults,allow_other 0 0

VMware Tools Issue in VMware Horizon

WDDM driver fails on Windows Update installation when Horizon Agent is installed on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2

When Horizon Agent is installed on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2008 R2, the WDDM driver fails on Windows Update installation.

WDDM driver is available through the Windows Update service when the driver publication process is completed.