How can I ensure HGFS in CentOS via Vagrant? - centos

Question

I am using Vagrant (1.7.4) with the VMware Fusion provider.
I have created a new VM from the centos/7 box, and configured shared folders in my Vagrantfile.
On startup, I get the message
HGFS was never found on the running virtual machine. This must be
installed either through VMware tools or Open VM Tools. HGFS is
required for shared folders to work properly. Please install either
the VMware tools or Open VM Tools and try again.
after a while, and the system starts up, but without the mounted shared volume.
I have tried installing Open VM tools, with a
sudo yum -y install open-vm-tools
in my Vagrant provisioner inline shell script
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install open-vm-tools
SHELL
However, I still get the message at startup, and I do not see the mounted share.
I have an almost identical Ubuntu box (precise/64) that seems to work just fine.

Answer 1

I looked up the box https://atlas.hashicorp.com/centos/boxes/7 and from the release notes they clearly mention that virtual box guest are not installed
The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin. We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible.
I think what they should mention is that they did not install the VMWare tools neither so default sharing folder with VMWare does not work.
How to install the VMWare tools for the VM
Make sure to mount a cd
Open VMWare Fusion and make sure the VM is down - open the VM settings, select the hard drive and add a device, select the CDRom.
boot the VM from the VM menu select Install VMWare Tools
Installing VMWare Tools
login to the VM (either from VMWare or open an ssh session with vagrant ssh)
Install pre-requisites and update kernel (at least I had to run to successfully install the VMWare tools on VMWare fusion 8.0 - see here)
sudo yum install perl gcc gcc-c++ make binutils
sudo yum update kernel
reboot and run the following again
sudo yum install kernel-headers kernel-PAE-devel
mount the VMWare tools
this is found from the VMWare doc - Make sure to run the below commands with root or add sudo
To create a mount point, run:
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
To mount the CDROM, run:
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
To copy the Compiler gzip tar file to a temporary local directory, run:
cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-<version>.tar.gz /tmp/
Where version is the VMware Tools package version. To determine the version of VMware tools, run:
ls /mnt/cdrom
You see output similar to:
VMwareTools-5.0.0-12124.tar.gz
To change to the tmp directory and extract the contents of the tar file into a new directory called vmware-tools-distrib, run:
cd /tmp
tar -zxvf VMwareTools-version.tar.gz
To change directory to vmware-tools-distrib and run the vmware-install.pl PERL script to install VMware Tools, run:
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
After all this, the tools were installed and shared folder is working correctly.
as a side note I can say that its much easier building a box with packer and install the tools directly from install. There are plenty of packer templates available on github for all versions of centos.