I’m in the midst of migrating a number of VMs from ESXi 6.5 hosts to ESXi 7.0.3, which means there are newer versions of the VMWare Tools available for the guests. Usually, selecting “Upgrade VMWare Tools” works seamlessly, but occassionally, the installer cannot properly uninstall the old version of the Tools, which results in the error Error upgrading VMWare Tools.

Attempting to remove it directly from the guest OS (x64 Windows, in my case) results in the installer prompting for a location for missing file VMWare Tools64.msi.

The fix for this is easy, but convoluted.

• Determine the version of VMWare Tools currently installed. I found the VMWare version-mapping file helpful.
• Download that version of the VMWare Tools package from VMWare.com. I prefer to use the ISO.
• Copy the ISO to your guest VM.
• Mount this ISO (in Windows, this is done by right-clicking and choosing ‘mount’)
• Open a command prompt and browse to the newly mounted drive.
• Locate the setup.exe file, which should be at the root
• Type setup.exe /a and press <ENTER>. You’ll be prompted for a location to save the extracted files
• After the files are extracted, re-uninstall VMWare Tools inside the guest.
• When prompted for the VMWare Tools64.msi file, browse to the location you just finished extracting the files to
• The uninstall should complete

Reboot the guest VM, then install the updated version of VMWare Tools!