If you need the vmware tools to come in the handy MSI format for installing automatically on your windows vm’s there is a very simple way of getting them.
When you get the message that your vmware tools are out of date click the update tools button to connect the vmware tools iso to a guest vm. then when the autorun pop up appears within the windows guest vm, close that and open up a command prompt window then type “d:\setupx64.exe /a” replace d: with the guests cdrom drive, this will launch the extract wizard which will ask you where you would like to extract the files to choose my documents or whatever you feel appropriate.
Once extracted you will find in the my documents folder (or the place of your choosing) will be the MSI file you need to deploy via gpo (or your normal software distribution medium). Naturally I would not suggest applying this wildly to a production network but I find it is handy to apply to my home lab domain where servers are not running all at the same time and it doesn’t really matter too much if something goes horribly wrong (not saying it will but I like to be rather careful with updating software and patches in production).
If you need the 32 bit version of vmware tools then just run the same command but with “d:\setup.exe /a” instead.
Author: Dale Scriven
