Answered by @mitchellh on twitter
VMWare tools installation is silently failing during install because of missing gcc and linux headers. I didn't see the error because I was running sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d
which doesn't stop on failure.
To fix the problem install prerequisites:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Then reinstall VMWare tools (without the -d
flag to make sure everything works properly)
sudo ./vmware-install.pl