After upgrading your VMware hosts to a new ESXi version, you will see a message on your VMs showing that a newer version of VMware tools is available. You need to upgrade VMware Tools and usually, that will require a reboot.
You can check your current version by clicking on the More Info as shown below. You will also see the warning message in yellow when the VM is selected.
vCenter should automatically upgrade the VMware Tools on reboot if you have that option enabled. To check if it’s enabled you can select the updates Tab of the VM
By having this option turned on, it should update VMware Tools on next reboot.
If you would like to upgrade the Tools right away and have the yellow warning disappear, without rebooting the VM you can do the following:
- Right click the VM and select Guest OS -> Upgrade VMware Tools…
- In the Upgrade VMware Tools window, select Automatic Upgrade
- Enter the following parameters in the advanced options to prevent the VM from rebooting:
| /S /v “/qn REBOOT=R ADDLOCAL=ALL REMOVE=Hgfs” |
By doing this we have suppressed the reboot and installed the new version.
The warning message is also gone. I still recommend rebooting the VM when possible or on the next scheduled maintenance window.