I was in the process of upgrading some of the VMware Tools on some guests since we have migrated our infrastructure to vSphere 4.1. I was able to install VMware Tools two times before I started getting a very non-descriptive error: "Error upgrading VMware Tools" and the only related event was "Task: Initiated VMware Tools install or upgrade"
A quick google search brought me to Error Upgrading VMware Tools. It's a simple fix to take care of this:
"For the windows failure, fix this by deleting the binary left over from the previous upgrade:
del C:\WINDOWS\Temp\VMwareToolsUpgrader.exe
For Linux failures, create the destination directory:
mkdir /tmp/vmware-root"
That's quite the pain if you have a lot of VMs. VMware Guest Console to the rescue! Using VGC we can deploy this simple batch file I wrote DeleteVMToolsUpgrader.bat to all of our Windows Guests at one time. If you have a Linux bash/shell script, I would be more than happy to post it here.
Here is our VM. It has the VMwareToolsUpgrader.exe sitting in the Windows/Temp directory
Using VGC, we will Deploy a Host Program to our VM. Likewise, you can click on your vCenter or ESX(i) server and it will send it to all VMs contained within
For this to run correctly, you must click the box that says "Save Program file" and specify a the destination C:\ on the guest. This will place the batch file in that location once deployed, but the last line of the batch will delete the batch file.
VGC Shows the deployment of the batch as successful
We can see that the batch file ran as well because the file has now been deleted
If we try to re-install VMware Tools, we are successful.
