How to install VMware Tools into Hyper-V Guest

Installing VMware Tools into a Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine has been requested a few times in order to save the time of installing the tools after a failover. The issue that is hit when trying to install the VMware Tools installer within a Hyper-V virtual machine is the VMware Tools installer checks for an underlying VMware product hosting this virtual machine. If it is not found, the installer will not continue.

If this is a necessary step you want to take, you’ll have to get your hands on a VMware Tools MSI and remove the table row that runs this check. If you currently have an MSI for VMware Tools, open it for editing (ORCA is a commonly used tool for this), and remove the row “VM_CheckRequirements” from the sequence table “InstallUISequence.”

You may not be able to find an MSI file; you can always build your own using the VMware Tools executable and perform the same row removal described above.

(more information on ORCA here: https://goo.gl/6MusYw)

Keep in mind this won’t be an officially “supported” installation procedure when installing VMware Tools. Also note that VMware Tools won’t actually startup while the virtual machine is running on Hyper-V, so you shouldn’t see any conflicts there.

For steps to officially install VMware Tools, consider a scripted install of VMware Tools once in the Failover or Failover Test state when running at the target VMware vSphere environment. VMware Tools can be installed on one or more VMware virtual machines through a command line script, or through vSphere. (more information on automated VMware Tools installation here:https://goo.gl/TOZJYT)

(Downloadable VMware Tools for ESXi 6.0 u2 Windows x64 Guests: https://goo.gl/juqSqo Follow directory structure for others versions and flavors)

For reference of direct examples, and a post by Shannon Snowden with another method for the re-IP process, see here.