Update VMWare Tools on Cisco CallManager 7.1 to ESXi 5.1

Intro

We have CUCM 7 running on ESXi 4.0 that was upgraded to 5.1. VMWare tools need to be installed or updated on the CallManager

Overview of the steps

1. Log in to the CUCM shell via "Remote Support" account
2. Initiate the VMWare tools install
3. Bonus: Troubleshooting an error 'No module mptscsi found'

1. CUCM Remote Support login

• Download the CentOS install disk. Tested working is 
• CentOS-5.5-i386-bin-1of7.iso (653,910,016 bytes)

• Log in to the CUCM console, and add a 'remote support' user
•  admin:utils remote_account enable
•  admin:utils remote_account create [username] [num of days active]

• Mount the CentOS ISO to the VM and reboot the CM
•  admin:utils system restart

• Boot to the CentOS CD, press 'esc' key during boot to get to the BIOS boot manager
• Select the 'recovery disk' option
• Mount the root partition '/' as there may be '/partB' as well
• Once you get to shell prompt, check these files
• #lsattr /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow

• In my case they were all --------, but if there's an immutable flag 'i' you will have to take it out
• #chattr -i /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group /etc/gshadow

• Change the password for the [username] used above in step 2
• #passwd [username]

• Reboot and unmount the CD from the VM
• Log in to the console using the [username] and password you reset in step above

2. VMWare Tools install

• In the vSphere client, initiate the vmware tools installation by going to Guest-> 'Install/Upgrade VM Tools'. Don't select the automatic install.
• Go to the console where you logged in with [username] and check that you have a folder /media/cdrom
• In my case, there was no /media/cdrom. Because of an upgrade it was located in /partB/media/cdrom however the /etc/fstab was still pointing to /media/cdrom
• I had to create folder /media/cdrom before mounting the CD, then just issue
• # mount /media/cdrom
• Copy the tools tar.gz from the CD to your home folder then untar and run the install script
• # cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-9.0.1-913578.tar.gz ~
• # cd ~
• # tar zxvf VMwareTools-9.0.1-913578.tar.gz
• # cd vmware-tools-distrib/
• # ./vmware-install.pl

• Take all the defaults the script offers. If you don't have errors, this should complete fine, in which case just reboot the server and enjoy the job well done.

3. BONUS. Errors!

During the install, just at the end it fails with an error message 

'No module mptscsi found for kernel x.x.x.x'

There's a lovely KB article on VMWare site at 

Upgrading VMware Tools fails with the error: No module mptscsi found for kernel x.x.xx-xx, aborting

Even though the kernel versions don't match, following the instructions to comment out 'mptscsi' from /etc/modprobe.conf worked. In my case I had to comment out two entries, 

/etc/modprobe.conf :
...
#alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptscsi
...
#alias scsi_hostadapter5 mptscsih
...
~

Re-running the 'vmware-install.pl' script completed successfully this time, and I uncommented those entries before the final reboot.