Setting VMware Tool settings from PowerCLI

Over a period of time, VMware Tools have changed within virtual machines. Initially, these tools were configurable within a virtual machine and included drivers for the virtual hardware specific to the operating system. The tools also provided some basic settings to allow the guest virtual machine to synchronize its time with the ESXi host and to automatically upgrade to a newer version of tools on shutdown. Tools also allow graceful shutdown of the guest operating system by executing a script inside the guest, rather than just powering off the VM.

Current versions of VMware Tools provide no user configurable settings inside the guest operating system and now require all of the configurations to occur at the VM level, the same as changing virtual hardware. At the same time, there are no native cmdlets to change the VMware Tool settings in the VM configuration. To make these changes, you will again have to turn to a VMView and custom configuration...