VMware Tools 10.3.0 Recall Due To The Connectivity Issues Of The Windows VMs With VMXNET 3 Adapter

It was a bit of news and VMware has recalled the release of the VMware Tools 10.3.0 and it is not available in the VMware Downloads section anymore.

It was causing some issues with the Windows Virtual Machines configured with VMZNET 3 adapters. I thought to do a quick write up for my readers to share this information and let’s see how can we check the running VMware Tools in the Virtual Machines in this article. 

First of all, if you have Virtual Machines with below criteria this article is probably for you and for your environment. 

Virtual Machines which are fits with the above criteria can be seen some network connectivity issues and can be ended up a PSOD situation. Due to this identified situation VMware has recalled the VMware tools 10.3.0 release and customers who fits with the above criteria should upgrade the VMware Tools to 10.3.2 immediately, otherwise tools should be updated to the VMware Tools 10.3.2 in your routine maintenance window. 

VMware Tools 10.3.2 Prerequisites And Supported Operating Systems

VMware Tools 10.3.0 depends on and ships Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable version 14.0. While preparing the system for VMware Tools 10.3.0 installation, Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable is installed on the system as a prerequisite. Installing or upgrading to VMware Tools 10.3.0 is not supported for Windows versions that do not meet the prerequisites and customers should continue to use VMware Tools 10.2.x or older until they can patch or update Windows OS to meet the prerequisites for VMware Tools 10.3.0.

Supported Windows Operating Systems :

It supports Linux guest operating systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and later, Ubuntu 10.04 and later. It also supports other distributions with glibc versions 2.5 and later and Mac OS X versions 10.11 and later.

How To Check The Virtual Hardware Version, VMware Tools Version And The Status Of The Virtual Machines

Power CLI can be used to check the VMware Tools version and the other relevant information for this, I suggest you to check this against your Virtual Machines and upgrade or downgrade the VMware Tools accordingly. If you need you can follow my previous article related to the Power CLI installation here. 

Open the Power Shell and run the below command 

Get-VM <VM_NAME> | Select Name, Version, ToolsVersion, ToolsVersionStatus | FT -AutoSize

You might be able to see something similar to this

In this output you can see only the Virtual Machine Hardware version only, don’t worry we are going to fix it now. Execute the below command to add the ToolsVersion property 

New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersion -ObjectType VirtualMachine -ValueFromExtensionProperty 'Config.tools.ToolsVersion'

Execute the previous command to check the status of the Virtual Machine and it will display the current version. In my output there is no VMware Tools installed it shows as “0” it will display your version accordingly 

To get the VMware Tools installation status run below command and check the Virtual Machine Status again, to add these properties forcefully you can use “-Force” command at the end of these commands

New-VIProperty -Name ToolsVersionStatus -ObjectType VirtualMachine -ValueFromExtensionProperty 'Guest.ToolsVersionStatus'

You can use below command with the pipeline to check the entire datacenter and for the all the Virtual Machines

Get-Datacenter "<DC_NAME>" | Get-VM | Select Name, Version, ToolsVersion, ToolsVersionStatus | FT -AutoSize

I hope this article is really useful to overcome any issues related to the recalled VMware Tools 10.3.0. 

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