How do I Correlate VMware Tools Version Numbers to a Corresponding ESX/ESXi Version?

A while back I posted a blog to answer the question “do I have to upgrade VMware Tools following an ESXi host upgrade?”.  In that post I showed how you can use the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix to list the supported tools versions for a given ESXi release.  Here’s a quick example showing the VMware Tools support available with ESXi 5.1 Update 1:

Notice that the interoperability matrix shows support based on the ESX/ESXi version that is providing the tools.   This is different from how the virtual machines report their VMware Tools versions.   The virtual machines lists their tools version as a four-digit number which has no correlation with the corresponding ESX/ESXi host version:

So how do you correlate the information provided by the interoperability matrix with the VMware Tools version as reported by the virtual machine?  You can get that information from here: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions.   This web page was recently updated to reflect the latest VMware Tools to ESXi host version mappings.

Hopefully, this will help make it easier to track VMware Tools versions throughout your environment.

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