Unattended VMware Tools Installation

Thursday, 26 April 2007 by Michel Roth

Aaron Parker previously shared his knowledge on the unattended installation of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. Today he has a small article up on the unattended installation of a piece of software that I actually install manually a lot come to think of it: VMware tools. I think this article is particularly useful if you're running Citrix on VMware boxes.

"Here's how to create an unattended installation of VMware Tools which I've aimed specifically at Terminal Servers, however you can apply the same concepts for any Windows server installed under any of the VMware virtualisation products.

When installing a Terminal Server on VMware Server or ESX, you need to ensure you do not install the memory control driver. To do this we need to create a custom transform file. I found the easiest way to do this was with Wise InstallTailor, unfortunately this tool is no longer available for free, so here's a copy of the transform that I've created, which prevents the Memory Control Driver, Shared Folders and Guest SDK features from installing."

Check it out.