How to install VMware Tools for Easy Cross-Hypervisor Migrations

Overview

This is a companion article to the Hyper-V Integration Services Installation article I did recently.

If you are looking to move a non-VMware based machine to VMware with minimal headaches then this is the article for you. These steps were meant to be used with Zerto Virtual Replication, however, they can be used independently too. With Zerto you can move VM’s from Azure, AWS, or Hyper-V to VMware quickly, and these steps will make the process even smoother.

Don’t overcomplicate this procedure

To an operating system, a virtual machine is a real computer, consisting of various hardware components like a motherboard, PCI bus, network card, USB controller, SCSI controller, etc. All of these devices require drivers in order for an operating system to use them properly. Ideally, Microsoft and VMware would have presented the same virtual hardware to the OS… but they didn’t.

If you have ever built your own PC, or are older than 30, then you know that Windows doesn’t always come with all the drivers that you need and you have probably loaded drivers via a disk or some other media in the past. That is the same process that installing VMware tools does for a VMware VM.

So at the end of the day… all we are doing is installing some drivers on a computer.

The goal

By the time you are done with the steps here, our goal is to have a Windows VM that can “wake up” on a VMware hypervisor (ESXi) with little or no intervention. To be successful we need to assign a new IP address and configure the networking. Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) is able to orchestrate this migration very easily assuming the VMware tools are installed while the VM is on the VMware host. Once Zerto Virtual Replication’s Cardhu release is generally available this procedure should also work for moving AWS VMs back on-premises to VMware.

The catch

VMware decided to put a “check” in the installation process of VMware tools to check to make sure the Windows machine you are installing tools on, is in fact, a VMware virtual machine. This means that out of the box you cannot install VMware tools on anything but a VMware virtual machine. Not to worry though, we can get around it.

How to make it work

The first thing that we need to do is use an existing Windows virtual machine that is on a VMware hypervisor to get the VMware tools installation packages. Once we have the packages we can then use a special tool from Microsoft to crack open the MSI package and remove the “VMware Virtual Machine” check from the installation process.

Here is a video walkthrough of the entire process. It shows the steps I used to gather the VMware tools installation packages, how to get them to a machine with ORCA (Microsofts MSI modification tool), as a resulting package that is able to be installed on a Hyper-V VM, and finally, Zerto doing a migration of the VM from Hyper-V to vSphere.

Takeaway

As you can see, migration from a non-VMware platform to VMware couldn’t be easier than with Zerto. The only roadblock is when the guest operating system does not have the required device drivers for the platform you are migrating to. If your situation is reversed, make sure to check out my other blog post on how to install Hyper-V Integration Services on a non-Hyper-V VM. That is one of the greatest things about Zerto, we do not care what platform you have chosen… we want to give you the freedom to take your data to whatever platform you want.

Thanks for reading!

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4 Responses to "How to install VMware Tools for Easy Cross-Hypervisor Migrations"

  1. I followed the steps to remove the row from the table for the latest version but it does not work. Do you know if any recent changes are done? any additional steps to follow?

  2. So I just tried this and it failed for me. But I found out why. You must modify the MSI on a non-vmware machine! If you attempt to modify the msi on a vmware machine it will not work when you copy it over to another machine.

    Additionally you need to have the iso mounted on the non vmware machine as well as using the modified msi as the msi will still go to the ISO directory for important files.

    1. download iso from https://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/
    2. mount iso on non vmware machine
    3. run setup.exe
    4. wait for error, close error window but not installer window
    5. copy msi file from temp directory
    6. edit msi file with orca
    7. drop vm check line as described in video.
    8. save msi
    9. close install window
    10. run new msi file

    And if you intend to do this on multiple devices just make sure you copy both the new msi file and the iso to each machine, mount the iso first before running the msi.


  3. 👔
    Excellent article, the help has come in handy for a version of vmtools.
    I’m trying to get 2 MSI, x86 version on a W2008 Server.
    The 2 versions I extract them well and I erase the line with ORCA.
    But when testing one it is installed and the other does not.
    The 10.1.5 OK
    But 10.3.5 gives a failure in the installation related to 2 services:
    “Could not start VMware Alias ​​Manager and Ticket Service”

    And also “VMware Guest Authentication Service Stopped workig and was Closed”

    And it takes me out of the facility.

    I have rebooted, tried to start the automatic Alias ​​service and it does not allow it.

    I have deleted the VMWARE folder

    I have uninstalled Visual C ++ which they said could be the cause …

    NOTHING

    is not allowed to install.

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