

VCDS LITE INSTALL
By doing this, we don’t have to explicitly set tools to install on specific machines, and instead let Munki do this conditionally. If we want to do this in a smart way, we can also have the management system install these tools only if the client is actually a VMware Fusion VM.Configuring this item as an install for our test machine or group of machines.
VCDS LITE SOFTWARE
Importing the guest tools installer into our software repo.There are a few pieces involved in setting this up: VirtualBox has yet to ship with any OS X guest tools. This technique should work for users of Parallels, if they use a sane OS X installer for their tools.

The same logic should apply for other software management platforms like Casper, Absolute Manage or Puppet, using their respective mechanisms for customizable discoverable attributes. In this post I’ll walk through the few steps I did to have all my test machines configured to automatically keep their VMware tools up to date. Luckily, I use Munki to manage OS X clients, and it’s great at updating software. I’d like to not have to manually click “Update VMware tools.” and go install the tools manually every time I notice the tools are out of date between snapshots (which on my system seems to be frequently). Sometimes when this happens, things like pasteboard synchronization, automatic window resolution resizing and drag-and-drop file transfers stop working. Over time, the VMware guest OS tools tend to drift out of date with the version of Fusion, and are reported to need updates/reinstalling. I use VMware Fusion to test client software, deployment workflows, and using virtual machines allows me to frequently take and roll back snapshots.
