[Review]: VMware Tools 10.2.0

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 18/12/2017 · Updated 04/04/2019

On This Post:

What’s New

The latest VMware Tools has been released by VMware and it’s including some new features and fixes. The most important new features are as follows:

Offline bundle with VMware Tools VIB: Offline bundles with VMware Tools VIB that can be installed on vSphere 5.5.x, 6.0.x and 6.5.x releases using vSphere Update Manager.
Improved lifecycle management of VMware Tools

FreeBSD support
ASLR support: Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique involved in preventing exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. In order to prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to, for example, a particular exploited function in memory, ASLR randomly arranges the address space positions of key data areas of a process, including the base of the executable and the positions of the stack, heap and libraries.

VMware has fixed some issues on VMware Tools 10.2.0:

Autofit Guest fails to function with VMware Tools 10.2.0
Attempts to use the multi monitor mode or unity mode fails on a Windows 10 guest operating system
After you log out and back in to a Windows 7 virtual machine that is running in full screen mode on multiple displays, the mouse pointer might not work properly

Attempts to use multiple screens fail on the Windows 2012 and Windows 10 guest operating systems
Windows Media Player is unable to play video files on Windows 10 Creators Update guest operating system
Connecting to View fails with a black screen intermittently

Windows virtual machine fails due to memory pressure
Windows 10 guest operating system with multiple virtual CPUs fails while playing videos using Windows Media Player
Partial black screen is displayed after setting multi-monitor resolution

Windows virtual machine fails while setting large multi-monitor display modes.
ReadEnvironmentVariableInGuest API returns system variable in Windows VM
Summary page of the VM does not list the IP address of the VMs in the right order

Guest authentication fails with a SystemError fault when the requested password is expired
The free space reported in vim.vm.GuestInfo.DiskInfo for a Linux guest does not match with df command in the guest
The guest file introspection kernel component might not run after upgrading VMware Tools

VMware user process might not restart after upgrades of open-vm-tools
Kernel modules were not upgraded after upgrading OSPs using the recommended procedure
In Windows Creators Fall release (1709) saving modified files using Office to a VMware Shared Folder can fail

Most of enterprise operating system supporting by the new version of VMware Tools:

Windows Vista and later
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and later, Ubuntu 10.04 and later – So CentOS 5 and later and Oracle Linux Enterprise 5 and later supported too.