Update VMware tools for Performance Cloud VMware virtual machines

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Summary
Known vulnerabilities
How to validate the installed version
Description
Windows Instructions

Summary

VMware tools are used to provide specialized drivers, advanced functionalities, and integrations within the VMware infrastructure. As with any piece of software, it is important to keep it up to date in order to ensure getting the latest bug and security fixes.

Known vulnerabilities

2023-OCT-26: VMware Tools contains a SAML token signature bypass vulnerability. This vulnerability is fixed in version 12.3.5 or later. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range. Please see sections below to identify the installed version and proceed with the update.

Reference: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0024.html

2023-AUG-31: VMware Tools contains a SAML token signature bypass vulnerability. This vulnerability is fixed in version 12.3.0 or later. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range. Please see sections below to identify the installed version and proceed with the update.

Reference: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0019.html

2022-AUG-23: VMware Tools contains a local privilege escalation vulnerability. This vulnerability is fixed in version 12.1.0 or later. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range. Please see sections below to identify the installed version and proceed with the update.

Reference: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2022-0024.html

2022-MAY-24: VMware Tools for Windows contains an XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability. This vulnerability is fixed in version 12.0.5 or later. Please see sections below to identify the installed version and proceed with the update.

Reference: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2022-0015.html

You may have received an email from Sherweb or saw a banner in the Performance Cloud VMware portal in Spring 2022 about a denial-of-service vulnerability in VMware Tools for Windows (CVE-2021-21997). This vulnerability is fixed in version 11.3.0 or later. Please see the section below to identify the installed version.

Reference: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2021-0011.html

How to validate the installed version

To verify the current version installed in your Windows virtual machines, do a right-click on the VMware tools icon in the system tray and select “About VMware Tools”. The installed version will be displayed.

Description

This article describes the steps to update existing virtual machines with the latest VMware tools. It assumes that the Performance Cloud VMware organization and virtual machines are already up and running.

You must run the latest version of VMware Tools or use the “open-vm-tools” command distributed with the Linux OS distribution. Although a guest operating system can run without VMware Tools, you must always run the latest version of VMware Tools in your guest operating systems to access the latest features and updates.

It is also possible to contact our Cloud Support team so we can enable the feature named “Check and upgrade VMware Tools before each power on” in the back end on each desired virtual machine(s). The next time the virtual machine is powered on, it checks the host for a newer version of VMware Tools. If one is available, it is installed, and the guest operating system is restarted (if required).

However, please be aware that in requesting the VMware tools auto-upgrade feature, Sherweb will not be responsible if the automatic upgrade fails and/or causes functionality issues to the virtual machines for which this feature is enabled.

For Linux or other Guest operating system, please refer to the VMware documentation: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1014294

Windows Instructions

** Not mandatory but strongly recommended as a requirement: execute a manual virtual machines backup and/or snapshot before the VMware tools upgrade.**

First you will need to mount the VMware tool CD-ROM image (ISO)

1. Log in to the Performance Cloud VMware portal.

2. Click on the virtual data center, then go to the Virtual Machines section.