Before you install VMware tools, you must install and boot the guest operating system.

To mount and unmount the VMware Tools installer CD as a CD-ROM for the guest operating system, use the methods of the

com.vmware.vcenter.vm.tools.Installer

interface.

To mount the VMware Tools, call the

connect(vm_ID)

method of the

Installer

interface. On Windows guest operating systems with activated Autorun feature, this method automatically initiates the installation of the VMware Tools and requires a user input to complete. On other guest operating systems, this method only mounts the VMware Tools disk image on the virtual CD/DVD drive and the user is required to do some guest OS-specific actions. For example, for some Linux distributions, the user is required to extract the contents of the VMware Tools installation archive and run the installer.

To unmount the VMware Tools installer CD image from the virtual CD/DVD drive, call the

disconnect(vm_ID)

method of the

Installer

interface.

To monitor the status of the VMware Tools installation, you can first retrieve the properties of the VMware Tools by calling the

get(vm_VM)

method of the

com.vmware.vcenter.vm.Tools

interface. The method returns a

ToolsTypes.Info

object which you can use to call the

getVersionStatus()

and

getRunState()

methods.

To upgrade the VMware Tools, call the

upgrade(vm_ID, commandLineOptions)

method of the

Tools

interface. The method takes as arguments the ID of the virtual machine on which the VMware Tools is installed and running. Use the

commandLineOptions

argument to specify the command-line options that you want to pass to the installer to modify the tools installation procedure. You can monitor the upgrade operation in the same way you monitor the installation operation.

To update the properties of the VMware Tools, call the

update(vm_ID, update_spec)

method of the

Tools

interface. Pass as argument a

ToolsTypes.UpdateSpec

object and define the tools upgrade policy settings for the virtual machine by calling the

setUpgradePolicy(upgradePolicy)

method.