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Installation of vmware tools on OL6u4 plus vmware shared folders

July 5, 2013
Linux
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This post is just a reminder to myself how to install the vmware (fusion) stuff in a fresh installed OL6u4 installation. To be honest, it isn’t entirely “fresh”: I’ve ‘yum update’ed the installation, and I’ve installed the 11gR2 preinstall package (yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall) package already.

1. Reboot
After the yum update and yum install of the oracle database preinstall package everything is updated, but not yet activated (new kernel). This means you need to reboot your VM first.

2. Install the kernel headers
Now the whole system is installed and setup we can *almost* install the vmware tools. However: the vmware tools need the kernel headers. If you look for the kernel headers, you *think* you see them:

# rpm -qa | grep headers
glibc-headers-2.12-1.107.el6.x86_64
kernel-uek-headers-2.6.32-400.29.1.el6uek.x86_64

But this is not the case. In fact, the system uses a different kernel version (2.6.39 in my case, which is the UEK2 kernel). But more importantly: the kernel headers are not in the kernel-uek-headers package (!!). In order to install the kernel headers which the vmware tools driver installation needs, you need to install the kernel-uek-devel package:

# yum install kernel-uek-devel

3. Make the vmware tools available to the VM, and extract the installer package
Virtual Machine>Install VMWare Tools.
Inside the linux VM:
# mount /dev/dvd /mnt -t iso9660
# cd /tmp
# tar xzvf /mnt/VMwareTools-9.2.2-893683.tar.gz

4. Install the vmware tools
# cd vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl -default
(the vmware tools installation starts, and it will choose all the default values)

For the installation of the grid and database software I’ve got the files setup/extracted outside of my VM, and use ‘shared folders’ feature of vmware (fusion) to mount these from my VM:

1. Enable shared folders in the vmware fusion hypervisor, and share a directory
Virtual Machine>Settings>Sharing
enable shared folders (off by default)
Press ‘+’, this will make a window available to select a folder. Select the folder in which the installation media (database and grid directory for Oracle 11.2.0.3 installation) is present, and click ‘add’.
(optional: set permissions in the shared folders window to ‘readonly’)
Take note of the name field, the name of the shared folder is what you need in the next step.
At this point the folder you selected is shared with the VM, and the sharing is enabled.

2. Make the shared folders visible in the Oracle Linux VM
The last step is to create a mountpoint for the shared folder (vmware creates it’s own directory ‘/mnt/hgfs’ but I like to create my own):

# mkdir /mnt/oracle11203

And make the mount permanent in fstab:

# vi /etc/fstab
.host:/oracle11203        /mnt/oracle11203      vmhgfs  default        0 0

All is setup now! Use the newly created static mount:

# mount -a

And make sure it’s there:

# mount 
...
.host:/ on /mnt/hgfs type vmhgfs (rw,ttl=1)
.host:/oracle11203 on /mnt/oracle11203 type vmhgfs (rw,ttl=1)