VMware Tools Downgrade

I ran into a situation where I needed to test upgrading VMware tools using an alternative method other than directly through vCenter or auto update. To do this testing I had to roll back the most recent version of VMware Tools on a VM to an older one. Uninstall latest, reboot, install older, reboot. No sweat, right?

Well this wouldn’t be much of a blog entry if that’s all there was…every time I rebooted after installing the older version – vCenter continued to report the tools version was up to date and everything was A-Ok. What was strange is even running the command line to verify the versions returned the latest version – and I know I used the older tools installer.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareToolboxCmd.exe -v

After uninstalling the newest version, I used the VMware KBase article for manually uninstalling VMware Tools to verify everything was gone – and it was – until I hit the last step: Delete the %ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware Tools folder.

I found a single text file called Manifest.txt which contained the current versions of everything that was installed with the latest VMware Tools. I deleted this file and ran the old VMware Tools installer and successfully reported back an “Out Of Date” Tools installation.

Tip: You can grab any version of VMware Tools from VMware’s Packages site here: https://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html