How To Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VMware is a mature and stable virtualization solution that allows you to run multiple, isolated operating systems on a single machine. When using VMware as the hypervisor, it is important to install VMware Tools in the guest to enhance the virtual machine performance. VMware tools package does not only enhance the performance of a virtual machine but also improves the interaction between the guest and host operating system. VMware tools add support for shared folders, clipboards, and drag, and drop functions. It also enables to synchronize time among the host and guest operating system

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of VMware Tools on an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04.

• Install VMware Tools Using Open VM Tools

sudo apt install open-vm-tools

If you are running Ubuntu Desktop, to install VMware Tools run:

sudo apt install open-vm-tools-desktop

• Install VMware Tools from ISO image

VMware itself recommends open-vm-tools for Ubuntu. But for some reason, if you want to install the VMware Tools package that ships with VMware, perform the following steps:

1. Right-click on the Virtual machine and click “Install VMware Tools.”.

2. Open the terminal and mount the ISO image to the /mnt directory:

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/

3. Move into the /mnt and extract the VMware Tools package to the /tmp directory:

cd /mnt/
sudo tar -zxvf VMwareTools-10.2.5-8068393.tar.gz -C /tmp/

4. Move into the /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/ and execute the vmware-install.pl script:

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

5. Respond to the configuration questions on the screen appropriately.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed VMware. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official VMware website.