initctl: Job failed to start. Unable to start services for VMware Tools

SOURCE: http://www.utterlyforked.com/vmware-fusion-5-and-cent-6-4/

Please get in touch if I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here, but, I think that the latest version of VMware tools has some incompatibilities with an out-of-the box Cent build (perhaps just the minimal install which I always use).

Firstly:
When installing VMware-tools the first time around I was getting errors with

initctl: Job failed to start
Unable to start services for VMware Tools

There’s a few internet fingers pointed at the ThinPrint setup; I’m not using printing at all but I’m going to speculate that an install of CUPS and a few other things will fix this. I thought I’d just disable it but this is where if you’re new to CentOS 6.0 you’ll be confused and the internet won’t really help you.

As of 6.0 CentOS ships with upstart. You can google upstart vs sysvinit but for the purposes of fixing VMware tools, just remove /etc/init/vmware-tools-thinprint.conf.

You should then be able to run /etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start to start everything you’ll need and it should automatically via upstart next time you reboot. You’ll not see anything in chkconfig as the VMware tools daemon isn’t LSB compliant. You’ll know if everything is running as it should because you’ll get an output when you start vmware tools

Starting VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Switching to guest configuration: [ OK ]
VM communication interface: [ OK ]
VM communication interface socket family: [ OK ]
Guest filesystem driver: [ OK ]
Mounting HGFS shares: [ OK ]
Blocking file system: [ OK ]
Guest operating system daemon: [ OK ]

and you’ll see the running process

1959 ? Ssl 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmware-vmblock-fuse -o subtype=vmware-vmblock,default_permissions,allow_other /var/run/vmblock-fuse
1981 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd

Secondly:
Blocking file system: [FAILED]

If you’re getting this when running “/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start” it’s down to VMware now relying on the FUSE project libs which aren’t necessarily installed. Fix with

yum install fuse-libs

Hope this helps somebody.

- See more at: http://www.utterlyforked.com/vmware-fusion-5-and-cent-6-4/#sthash.ZA8D86cU.dpuf