To continue my tutorial on how to install VMware Server on debian Etch we will now install the vmware tools in one of our debian Virtual machines. The wmware tools are needed if you want to be able to stop a virtual machine from the command line using vmware-cmd and it can also help to correct the Time sync problem with virtual machines running debian.

First we install the required packages:
apt-get install autoconf automake binutils cpp gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) make psmisc
Now we need to connect to our vmware server using the vmware server console. We need to start the debian virtual machine in order to install the vmware tools. As soon as your virtual machine is started you can right click on it’s name in the inventory and click on “Install vmware tools”. Log into your virtual machine and do the following to mount the virtual cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom
You should be able to see your cdrom using the command mount. Mine is mounted at /media/cdrom0
You just have to copy the vmware tools to another location and install it.
cd /media/cdrom0
cp VMwareTools-1.0.4-56528.tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf VMwareTools-1.0.4-56528.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
Just follow the installation script and press enter to accept the default for every question.

Et voila !

You may notice that your virtual machine clock is running to fast or to slow. In this case you need to edit the configuration file for your virtual machine (the .vmx file) and change the value of tools.syncTime to “TRUE”.
You also need to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst and add the following kernel options: clocksource=pit nosmp noapic nolapic nohz=off
Your file should then look something like this:
[...]
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-5-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro clocksource=pit nosmp noapic nolapic nohz=off
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-5-686
savedefault
[...]

Another cool tip to finish ? ok let’s go !
You may need to copy a virtual machine and run another copy of it at the same time. In this case you will notice that if you change the identifier of the virtual machine (you have to if you want to run them at the same time) the network interface is changing from eth0 to eth1 and incrementing each time you duplicate the machine. To correct this you simply need to delete one file in your virtual machine and reboot it:
rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

Any questions ?